


Flickers

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Animal Death, Blood, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Allura/Lance (Voltron), Minor Character Death, Oblivious Shiro (Voltron), Past Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Pining Keith (Voltron), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Shapeshifting, Supernatural Elements, Unreliable Narrator, ancient gods, slowburn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2020-10-18 15:03:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20641133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: Find what you love and let it eat you alive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Content Warning**: This story contains themes that might be upsetting to some readers. Please read the tags carefully before continuing.

The stars that night had been distant and small. They’d looked like holes poked in the thick black fabric of the inky, overhead sky, as though Shiro were peering not at a vast and endless universe, but through the fibers of a wooly blanket at the spots of light existing somewhere far away beyond it.

It was warm, and that warmth was thin and breezy and easy on his lungs. Sometimes the winter felt too dry, like menthol stinging in his throat and running frigid fingers from his trachea all the way down into the deepest pits of his belly. And sometimes the summers were so humid that they constricted his lungs and clogged in his throat and made everything in the world feel congested and damp, and muted beyond his inability to intake a single, dry breath of oxygen.

But not that night, no. That night, it was perfect outside. Late spring, the chill of the recent winter ebbed away. Quiet save for cricket-song and serene at nearly midnight when each of his neighbors had already long since gone to sleep. The windows of each cul-de-sac house had been darkened. The street lamps deeper in the throat of the neighborhood had been dull enough that their light hadn’t reached upward and extinguished the stars.

The roof tiles under his palms were scratchy and pliable enough that he resisted the urge to test their bendability between his fingers, lest he snap one off and find himself unable to mend it again. This bungalow was a rental that he shared with two housemates. His room at the top corner had the easiest access to the overhanging roof. The other tenants, Adam and Matt, took up residence in rooms closer to the kitchen and the bathroom respectively, these locations providing each of them with their own unique set of perks. Adam liked to wake up early in the morning and use the blender in the kitchen for his protein shakes. Matt stayed up late at night and often tripped over his own feet in pursuit of the toilet through the darkened hallway. 

Shiro liked to stargaze and he kept an expensive, weighty telescope pointed through the window towards the sky at all times. It was capped often, to preserve the lens and protect it from invasive dust, but on perfect evenings when the clouds parted and the light pollution ebbed to nothing more than an annoying but altogether insignificant non-deterrent, he liked to spend his time admiring the faraway galaxies and scribbling down notes about the appearance of constellations in a worn, leather-bound notebook that he kept sitting on his desk next to the window. That night was insubstantial as far as stargazing went. He hadn’t brought out his binoculars or his notebook and he hadn’t bothered even entertaining the idea of uncapping the telescope. It was too cloudy and his contacts had bothered him so much during the day that he’d resorted to wearing his glasses. It was inconvenient to use the telescope while wearing them, but impossible to see anything without them. But sometimes, he understood, it was nice just to watch the sleepy night sky with his own two eyes, far away, as a reminder of just how far he’d have to climb to reach them.

Takashi Shirogane was, then, a nineteen-year-old college student majoring in astrophysics. He’d had big dreams back then and wide eyes, and a conscience unstricken by guilt and substantially weightless in the absence of mourning. And he had no family that he’d left back home as Matt or Adam had. He stayed in the bungalow during every holiday and over the duration of the summers. He enjoyed it sometimes, having the first go at the shower when the water maintained warmth longer. Access to all of his snacks in the fridge without hiding them or scrawling his name passive-aggressively over the packaging in thick, permanent marker.

He longed for many things but found himself complacent at that moment, sitting on the rooftop and watching the satellites blipping by and the unmoving pinpricks of the stars watching over him. He marveled at how many of them resided there. He wondered if he could spend an entire lifetime counting them and never reach the end, and knowing the answer to that despite how whimsically he’d decided to think about it without reminding himself of reality for just a little bit longer.

He’d heard someone open his bedroom door and call his name into the room, but he ignored them. His head dropped against his shoulder and his fingernails scraped against the roof tiles, and he wondered about Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia while drawing his eyes lazily over the sky without committing fully to identifying them. The window just behind him slid further open. He didn’t react to the tap of it against the sill or the shuffling of clothing and heavy, unsteady limbs as someone else climbed out behind him.

“I knew you’d be out here,” someone told him—someone who he recognized but maintained his silence in the presence of. Someone who he found still couldn’t rival the night sky for his attention.

A warm body planted itself clumsily next to his. He didn’t like the relief that he felt then, the feeling of not being totally alone under the blanket of night and the realization that despite how earnestly he’d committed himself to marry only the universe beyond the atmosphere, his petty human wants and human heart persisted.

Adam had smiled then, something that he’d picked out from blurry lines in his peripherals. He’d crooked his head up and taken in the blanket of twinkling above them and he’d bit out a laugh, a shallow breath, the beginning of a sentence that he’d cut off as he’d rearranged himself to settle with a small amount of his weight leaned against Shiro’s side and hands tucked safely in his lap.

“Matt was looking for you earlier. He wanted to know if you’ll water his cactus while he’s gone.”

Shiro had offered a short laugh at that, dropped himself back with palms moved behind him but kept his eyes planted firmly on the sky.

“Do you think it’ll make a difference?” he’d asked then, his voice scratchy and unpracticed and still clumsy despite how long he’d known both of them. Despite how secretly, he knew that he wanted so desperately to love something tangible and  _ real _ , that he could actually reach out and touch. “He’s only going to be gone for a week. Aren’t you only supposed to water them once a year or something?”

Adam laughed again, too. 

“Not that rarely. That’s why you’re not majoring in botany, I guess.”

Silence enveloped them. Shiro enjoyed the sensation of an organic body planted near enough that he could feel the tepid warmth of it. He grated his nails in the scratchy roof tiles and found himself outlining the fuzzy visage of Sagittarius despite affording it little attention.

“I think he just wants to talk to you,” Adam said, turning to face him, focusing the warmth of his dark eyes on Shiro’s face and notably not mentioning the color that rose to his cheeks as a result of it. “He’s going to miss you while he’s away on Spring Break. People  _ like _ you, Shiro. People want to say goodbye properly to people who they like.”

Shiro nodded, but he found himself bereft to connect the dots of Adam’s sentence with even an ounce of the ease with which he connected each distant corner of Sagittarius. He dragged in a long breath, ignoring the trembling of his heart and turned his eyes to Adam.

Adam was handsome, he knew, and had known, embarrassingly, since the first moment that he laid eyes on him. Adam was smiling at him in that gentle way that he often did when he reminisced how Neanderthalesque Shiro had been when he’d first answered his and Matt’s ad for a roommate and passed the background check. He was smiling at Shiro as though Shiro was still that same person: someone ill-equipped for human companionship like a dog that had spent its entire life locked in a very small cage. Like he’d been crystallized for many years and freed only now, and the task of socializing him had been rested on Adam and Matt’s shoulders.

It was a look of admiration, the way that a person might smile at a kitten that scratched and nibbled at their fingers. But he recognized the condescension nonetheless and felt the subtle stings of it, wondering internally if he’d ever reach a level of humanity at which Adam would stop regarding him as anything but a cute and unruly pet. 

He hadn’t known how to cook or do dishes back then, when he’d first set out on his own and gravitated to both of them. He’d been very good at keeping things tidy and taking out the trash. But he didn’t understand what the point was of having group meals or hanging out. He’d spent long stretches of time holed up in his room, studying and watching the stars. He’d known them only vaguely by face and forgotten their names for long instances until Matt had finally bitten the bullet and planted himself firmly on Shiro’s bed for entire nights sometimes, just keeping him company quietly while he worked.

Like taming a feral animal, perhaps. Pulling away each piece of Shiro’s protected armor until finally, he’d discovered the smallest nugget of a normal human that existed underneath.

Shiro hadn’t known exactly which words to use to describe to either of them that his upbringing hadn’t prepared him for the social life that came with college. He’d told them briefly of the group homes and foster parents that he’d flitted through after his grandfather died in his youth, explained to them that connections seemed unnecessary when most things in the world were only temporary blips that fizzled out long before they’d ever be given the opportunity to be truly known by him.

He’d found comfort in stars as a child, naively thinking that every twinkle in the sky would be the same from the first time that he gazed up at them and that they’d maintain their livelihood until he died. And he’d been devastated at twelve to learn that many stars, too, passed away. But he hadn’t told them that part. Hadn’t said in so many words that perhaps it was safer to stay friendly and distant if only to lessen the risk of every goodbye hurting more than he’d ever be capable of overcoming.

But it seemed that Adam, at least, understood that. And it seemed that over time, despite himself, Shiro hadn’t been completely capable of turning off his very natural, biological need to find himself close to another human body that he found to be particularly attractive. And funny, and kind, and patient, and—

“You like the stars because they’re reliable, right? You said something like that a long time ago. But they’re pretty, too, which helps, I’m sure. Gastrointestinal distress is also pretty reliable, but people don’t exactly wax poetic about that.”

Adam laughed, and Shiro laughed. And he thought about himself and space, and Adam’s hand lingering a few short centimeters away from his and how easy it would be to lace their fingers together and how it had felt perfectly warm outside just before Adam had come to join him, but then it felt so frigid that he almost couldn’t stand being so far away from him. He thought about the sky and about reliability and about the risk involved in loving another person. He wondered if the pain was worth the journey, really, or if all of the poets throughout history were liars, and what Adam, as a linguistics major, might think about the whole thing.

But he didn’t say any of it. He stayed quiet because he wasn’t, yet, good with words. He didn’t know what a normal person would say to someone who they wanted very much to be closer to, and to hold their hand, and even to kiss them. And he decided that maybe maintaining this quiet was the best way not to make a fool of himself tonight and cut off all channels to that very desirable destination before he ever got the chance to make it a reality.

But Adam continued, better at that sort of thing than he was. Always, somehow, knowing just what to say before the words managed to materialize in the back of Shiro’s thoughts. 

“We’re not so different from stars, really, are we Takashi? Calling out into an endless nothing in the desperate hope that even years after we’re dead and gone… maybe someone else will see the residual light that we’ve left behind and feel comforted by it. We’re here then we’re gone and not very much changes, but… when you were a little kid, you were comforted by the sky, right? By all of those stars that you thought would last forever. And right now, even though none of this is going to last… I’m happy, too, because of you.”

Adam’s eyes were wide and dark and all-encompassing when Shiro turned to gaze down at him. They were twin universes reflecting back at him every thought in his head and every fear in his heart. And Adam’s hand was warm and unyielding, but soft. It wasn’t far away and it wasn’t untouchable and distant, and his lips were gentle and patient even when Shiro dithered for a moment too long before bridging the space between them.

In the outlying streets, growing louder and louder around them, there was a strange screeching, like brakes groaning and tires tracking dark lines over asphalt. Shiro could hear his pulse, deafening in his ears, and he could feel his body thrown wildly, strapped down with a belt so tight over his chest that it felt as though it might slice straight through him.

The stars that night were so scattered and blinding, hanging overhead like a halo of glass.

Splintered from the windshield of a car.

At the moment of impact, before everything, startlingly fast, faded to black.

  
  
  


Shiro awakens to the slow rise of the sun. The birds stationed on gnarled tree branches just outside of his window chitter and chirp jovially as his eyes crack open and he draws in a long, slow breath that drags in the depths of his sleep-dried throat.

He raises a hand to rub at his eyes, grimacing at the taste of his own bad breath on his tongue and the crust that’s accumulated over his lashes in sleep. And he finds himself staring for a long moment at a bluejay situated just on his windowsill, wondering idly if he needs to refill his bird feeder and if maybe the birds themselves are frustrated with his laziness. Maybe they’re organizing some kind of coup as he watches them, plotting to bombard him with their furious droppings the moment that he steps outside to grab his mail.

He wants to tell them that he just doesn’t have the urge to scale a ladder with that overweight bag of feed slung over his shoulder. The last time that he attempted it, he’d nearly toppled down and snapped his neck. He definitely isn’t looking forward to encountering his near-death once again today. He knows painfully well that it would take so long for anyone to notice his absence at work and at the few places that he frequents away from home. And in that time, a rogue coyote would probably take off with his remains long before anyone came here to check up on him and discovered that he was no longer an insignificant part of this mortal coil. 

It’s a morbid thought, one that ripples small pinpricks over the stump of an arm remaining on his right side. He sucks in another deep breath. He doesn’t want to put on his prosthetic either. He doesn’t want to touch his warm, bare feet to the cold wooden floor. He doesn’t want the last of sleep to flee him and for the heat that he’s collected here under his heavy down comforters to be replaced with the miserable chill of the early autumn morning.

He allows a few more moments to pass by. He can afford it, he knows, at the expense of staying up later tonight. He doesn’t have a workplace in the traditional sense. It’s more of a shed out back that he’s refurbished into a home office where he infrequently works on his new assignments. It isn’t necessary for him to be present for every passing day at the brick and mortar address where his company resides.

He’s a columnist for the local newspaper, a writer of fleeting journals about space travel and the meaning of the universe and armchair philosophy that he knows that anyone with half a brain could pick apart and poke sizable holes in without even breaking a sweat. He isn’t particularly proud of his job title either, doesn’t call himself a journalist or columnist or even a writer at dinner parties for the paper or any get-togethers that he can’t find the proper excuse to avoid before the dates printed on the invitations expire.

In his growing age, that only gets unfortunately older with each passing month, he finds that he’s having more difficulty forgoing social outings. He doesn’t have the mental prowess necessary to run circles around his employers and sponsors any longer. He attends semi-monthly fundraisers and awards ceremonies. He does the dog and pony shows in exchange for being left relatively alone. But he still abhors them, still finds himself dreading each tastefully-decorated envelope that he finds hidden deceptively among the bills and coupon books shoved in his rusted mailbox. He spends many events as a wallflower, content to eat the little sausage slices and cheeses on toothpicks and offer his applause at appropriate intervals, but sometimes, he knows, speaking to another person is necessary. Introducing himself to someone who his boss carts in his direction is unavoidable.

And at such moments, he’s never quite honed the finesse required to navigate a professional conversation without wrongfully labeling himself with a career that just doesn’t feel like it’s the right fit for him.

At the last dinner, he was an editor. At another, he did Crime Scene Investigation for the paper. He’s found over the years that he can be anyone that he wants to be when he’s speaking with people who he’ll never see again, can slip into the skin of any man who he thinks might be much happier than he is, here, on eighteen acres of secluded wooded land marked with a bright yellow “NO TRESPASSING” sign hung with chain just at the beginning of his steep, rocky driveway. 

But today, regardless of his endless, early-thirties turmoil and the weight of the universe perpetually pressed down on his aching shoulders and his dislike of life’s many wrongful punishments and shortcomings that seem cultivated with the sole intention of dicking him over at every turn, he needs to stop by the grocery store, he can’t let himself forget. He’s out of milk and cereal. His reserve of frozen meat is becoming so frightfully low that he’s eaten nothing but frost-bitten pork chops for the last week and a half. He doesn’t want to make small talk with the clerk at the store. He doesn’t want to smile and wave at the small children hanging out of the safety seats at the front of their parents’ overstuffed carts. He doesn’t want to say “hello” or “good morning” or “can you believe the weather?” to anyone who he might pass on the way inside. But he resigns himself to this, as well, as a person who wants someone to deliver his groceries here even less, lest they witness the disarray in which he’s left his home here.

The grass is overgrown and wild and dotted with molehills and deer droppings that he’s never bothered to clean up. The yard is littered with crushed and dirty beer cans that he left splayed around over the summer, when he’d gone on a particularly self-destructive alcoholic bender that had eaten an entire three weeks of his life. They’re rusty headstones erected in memory of those especially low points in time. Every instance that he even considers stooping down and collecting all of them in the recycle bin, he can’t resist the urge to head back inside and finish off another six-pack instead.

There isn’t a good conclusion here, he finds, still cocooned in under his down blanket, still watching the birds fluttering together outside and setting his sights solely on that bluejay, still poised at the ledge of his window. He can stay here all day and spend the rest of tonight catching up on a particularly aggravating “Ask Andrea” questionnaire that he’s been tasked with responding to this week. He wonders idly if the readers would be horrified to discover that the person responding to all of their conservative Christian questions is, in fact, a thirty-year-old man with his shit so wholly un-put-together that no one in their right mind should actually take his advice. That maybe, if they understood that Andrea retired three years ago to move on to bigger, greener pastures and the newspaper simply shoved her workload off on the first sorry sucker who needed a few extra dollars every week for collecting and answering their questions, if they’d stop writing in altogether.

And if they could fathom that they’ve been questioning how to keep their faith alive in a growing household to a man who hasn’t believed in God for over ten years now, if maybe… they’d question what sort of newspaper the town was supporting in the first place. And what sort of God would put them at the mercy of such a heathen who hasn’t believed a single line of bullshit that he’s fed them since he typed his very first response.

He knows, deep down, that he takes that job a little bit more seriously than he probably should. He knows that oftentimes, he finds himself channeling the energy of some peppy 40-something mother of four who packs her kids’ lunches every day before she buckles down and shares her wisdom with readers of the local paper once per week. He finds himself slipping into character so fluidly at times that he wonders if he might have been Andrea in a past life, and if, in that life, he was happier, or if he might have simply just been better at pretending that happiness was attainable. 

Perhaps _ Ask Andrea  _ readers would be comforted by how personally he takes their victories and their failures, their love, and their pain. That maybe, even though he can’t understand them completely, he’s always found that it’s particularly rewarding when a reader writes back to tell him of the successes that his advice afforded them.

He’s a fraud, sure, but at least his heart is in the right place. And in the event that somehow Andrea’s true identity as a reclusive, thirty-year-old man who hasn’t vacuumed his carpets or taken out the trash in approximately three months is uncovered, that might be enough for all of his readers to forgive him.

It doesn’t matter, when push comes to shove. Shiro isn’t outing the truth any time soon. He isn’t going to come out with this particularly juicy piece of gossip solely because he doesn’t even have anyone to leak it to. All of his worldly connections these days total to Katie, his editor at the newspaper, Lance, a travel columnist who stops by every so often to drop of exotic coffees that he purchases during his travels, and Allura, his boss, who is currently spamming him with text messages, if he’s reading the name lit up on his phone screen on the nightstand correctly. 

He groans, shoving himself up on his elbow and grasping his phone as it vibrates once again. Allura has sent him three consecutive texts now, each asking him if he might be able to stop by the publishing house on his way home from buying his groceries. He doesn’t remember telling her that he was going shopping today, but the date has been marked on his calendar for weeks now. Maybe he’s just more of a creature of habit than he’s ever realized. Maybe Allura is just that in tune with the goings-on of the universe that she sensed that he was grappling with the idea of buying more supplies today and needed an extra push in order to do so. Regardless, he clumsily unlocks his phone one-handed, typing in a response at the only slow pace that a single finger to type with allows him.

**Me 7:42 AM** : I can stop by later if you need me. What’s this about?

**Allura 7:44 AM** : I understand that you have quite a workload right now, but we’ve been given a story that I think you’d be a perfect fit for. We need a writer who can capture the nuances of this case, and I believe that you’re our strongest choice.

**Me 7:47 AM** : I’ll stop by later today. I have to run some errands after.

**Allura 7:55 AM** : Groceries, right? There’s a sale on pork at Lion’s Head. You should stop by there and take advantage of it.

He sets his phone aside, scrubbing a hand over his face and turning himself over so that his back falls against the creaky mattress and his face points directly upward at the ceiling. In the high rafters, angled in a slanted triangle shape towards the center of the room, shadows morph into the form of leaves against his bedroom window, casting a long, darkened line into the steep corners and obscuring his view of many cobwebs that he’s neglected to clean over the months. 

He’s neglected to do a lot of things, he knows. He hasn’t mowed or collected his trash or done dishes in so long that he’s been eating out of the same Tupperware bowl that he rinses out each night before he goes to bed for what feels as though it could have been years by now, but in reality, probably still sits at an impressive three or four months straight. That the grass outside tickles his bare calves when he wanders to the end of his long driveway to grab his mail from the tattered box at the open mouth of the street leading in, a fifteen-minute walk that he always tells himself will clear his head but always just reminds him, instead, of the disrepair that he’s left his home in when he returns. 

He hasn’t done much laundry, hasn’t managed to fix the broken hose in his dryer for so many months that he’s gotten used to washing his favorite pair of pajamas in the shower while he bathes and hangs them from the shower curtain pole to drip dry for a few days before he needs to wear them again. He’s still using the same towel that he dried his hair with last Spring, still hasn’t remembered to change out the cute little bunny and chick patterned hand towels that he bought from the local grocery store on sale after Easter and fitted on the bar above his toilet. He knows that this is no way to live. As Lance might tell him, this is no home to bring a date back to. It’s nothing but decrepit sadness here, nothing but a black hole that he throws himself and his agony inside of and hopes each night that maybe it will spit him back out as a better person in the following morning, who is actually capable of doing all of the cleaning and preening and home repair that any other functional adult might be able to do without thinking about it.

And he never has the heart to tell Lance or Allura or the few other people who actually know him or care about him that he’d love nothing more than to rot away here, sunk into the soil and pulverized, like his old beer cans and leftovers and garbage spilled out from the holes in the bags, before being taken to the Earth by the maggots and the scavengers. He could disappear into the wilderness like the leftovers that he often tosses out back for the opossums and raccoons. Like the stale birdseed that’s slowly emptying out from that stupid feeder in its too-high spot in the trees.

There was a time, long ago, when he’d dreamed of reaching greater heights than the top step on that ladder against the old oak, but he’s less an arm now than he was when he was stupid enough to dream it. And he’s minus a lot of other things that he’d rather not think about right now. Until someday, years from now, when he finally falls and snaps his neck out in the woods and everyone can finally stop feeling like they should do something to help him out of this persistent rut that’s eaten away at an entire decade of his youth.

Thirty this year, he pushes a hiss of a breath through his teeth.

He shoves up from the mattress and grimaces when the cold rises to greet him. His feet against the wooden floor feel tender and prickled with the chill there, but he presses on. The bluejay flutters away through the branches of the old oak as he draws too near. The birdsong persists. Through the yellowing leaves, he can see the orange-cast of the sun. It’s chilly and bright outside, and a bed of leaves settles over the scattered beer cans sparkling with the morning dew, a story down from his spot at the window to the ground. He feels like today will be a good day to traverse civilization. Today, he’ll wear his nicest clean sweater and he might even treat himself with a coffee from the local shop that he likes.

For now, he lopes through his bedroom door, mindful of the mess of dirty clothes littering the floor, careful of the weird spot on the rug in the hall that always trips him before slipping into the bathroom and pawing at the wall to find the light switch. It shudders on, buzzing overhead before the exhaust fan kicks on to drown it out. There are dark circles hollowed under his eyes in his yellowy reflection, cast over by a sickly glow of the cheap-brand light bulbs that he’d gotten on sale the last time that he went into town. They make everything in the bathroom look washed out, but he wonders if that’s for the best. If perhaps putting a rosy hue on all of this will make him complacent, and if one of these days, when he’s actually willing to make a change in his life as Lance is so determined that he will eventually be, he might be inhibited if he can’t see firsthand exactly how terribly he’s running himself into the ground.

As it is, the piss-glow of the bathroom light brings out the deep brown stains in the grout between the tiles. It doesn’t hide the dark speckles of trimmed hair dotted over the lip of the sink or the splotches of old toothpaste on the mirror. The overflowing trash can looks as though it’s got a filter over it, some gritty live-action modern photography piece showcasing the depressing lifestyle of perhaps the sloppiest bachelor in the entire United States. And he knows that Lance is right: this is no place to ever invite another person.

And despite how painfully he knows that Lance meant it as no compliment, he can’t shake the feeling that this might be exactly what he wants.

He pulls his nightshirt over his head, discarding it on the floor next to an old towel that may or may not be collecting dark mold and a pair of boxers that have been sitting there for so long that he wonders if the tiles underneath it are lighter and cleaner. He steps out of his pants and boxers in one go, drawing his fingers through his hair and tossing a final look at his pathetic reflection in the mirror before he steps forward and cranes himself around the shower curtain to turn the knobs. He draws it a little bit hotter, feels that perhaps he’ll need all of the warmth that he can get today. It’s growing only colder every passing week, drawing nearer to November as the radio stations begin advertising haunted houses and Halloween parades, and the shops in town hang orange and black decorations from their low-hanging roofs.

He used to like trick-or-treating as a kid. He used to like spending one single night out of the year in someone else’s skin. He’d fantasized often as a young child in unchangeable and uncontrollable circumstances about the characters in comic books who could shed their skin and take the form of another person. Werewolves and shapeshifters and vampires who could turn themselves into bats. He’d liked the idea of it, of growing feathers from the tips of his fingers or webbing between his elbows and his ribs. And spreading himself out and flying away to something else, to be someone else, and sink comfortably into the life that a different, happier, person might have left behind.

Regardless of his fantasies and the fact that he could have been anyone that he wanted to be every Halloween, he almost always chose an astronaut, or a superhero, or someone important who could change the world. He liked the candy, too, until things changed, but…

Again, he doesn’t want to think about it.

He finishes his shower, deciding to forgo breakfast in favor of eating something at the diner that he likes in town. He imagines that his meeting with Allura won’t take long, that it won’t be anything more than writing another feel-good article about a dog that learned to walk with just its back legs or some prominent young couple in town finally tying the knot. He’s used to these sorts of things, knows better by now than to get his hopes up when he considers how few events of real interest take place in town. And he doesn’t mind it, not really. He’s not a real journalist, or a writer who feels the need to chase a bigger story. He isn’t looking for his big break or his stepping stone into having his own column under his actual, real name.

He’d fallen into this career accidentally, once upon a time, while sitting at a bar in town after visiting with an old college friend. His friend took one long, hard look at the pathetic, run-down state of his existence after he flunked out of graduate school and lost his scholarship and cut off all ties with any career that could potentially offer him even an unpaid internship that he wouldn’t possibly be able to afford. He’d bought both of them a round of drinks and some bar fries that Shiro had been picking at for hours until they got cold and mushy. He’d slung his arm over Shiro’s shoulders and pulled him close, and Shiro had felt absolutely mortified about how great it had felt then to be touched by a person who wasn’t a surgeon or a nurse, how amazing it was after so much time had passed to feel the intoxicating warmth of another organic being reaching out and making contact with his skin.

His friend had told him, _ “There’s a slot open at my work because the lady who used to write the astrology column decided to open her own tarot shop full-time. Astrology and astronomy, both are related to stars, right? Maybe that’ll be enough to tide you over until something better comes along.” _

But it’s been ten years now, and still, he hasn’t budged from this place. If anything, he’s bought a cabin within city limits and made friends with his boss and some of the locals, and he feels as though he’s been threaded so tightly into the fabric of this community that he’d have a hard time traveling somewhere far away if an opportunity actually were to arise.

Today definitely isn’t a day for opportunities, he knows that. Today is a day for the same-old, for meeting with Allura and brushing up on his extra assignment and picking up another gallon of milk and some odds and ends from the grocery store. He’s not sure if he’s content with that or if he’s simply given up on hoping for more, but he doesn’t distract himself with the finer details as he slings the straps of his prosthetic over his shoulder and tightens the clips, as he steps into his pants and shrugs on his shirt, tousling his wet hair in some semblance of a real hairdo before he finishes the last touches of his morning routine. 

_ Brush your teeth, put on deodorant. Be a functional person. Act like a human being. Find some socks that don’t smell too bad. Put baby powder in your shoes so your grubby socks don’t permanently mark them with their stink. _

_ Wear a jacket outside or you’ll freeze later. Try not to look as slovenly as you feel inside. _

_ Don’t forget to smile. Don’t forget to keep pretending that everything is fine. _

He settles on a thick workman’s jacket that’s sitting in the back of his closet. Lance brought that over last Spring, from a trip that he took to Alaska while he was working on an article about the fishing communities up there. He spent a grand total of two weeks in the frosty boroughs of Nome, sending Shiro periodic emails about his misery and his growing suspicion that he might lose a few fingers and toes to frostbite before everything was said and done, but ultimately, he returned with each of his phalanges still intact.

He’d gifted Shiro a knife hilted with some kind of ornately carved bone and the workman’s jacket. No matter how many times he’d tried to claim that the inside was lined with real polar bear fur, and no matter how many drinks Shiro had downed as they’d talked, he’d never managed to believe even one bit of it.

But it’s a nice jacket anyway, thick and roomy in a pleasant, innocuous tan color, rimmed in darker brown wool around the collar and the sleeves. It fits the rural aesthetic of the town just fine, as he’d often felt out of place in his city clothes when he first moved here. Now, he settles on heavy boots that won’t become too damaged in the mud and the powdery dirt of some of the side roads. He wears faded blue jeans and a button-down flannel underneath. It’s cold enough today that he can get away with it, invisible enough when he thinks about being flanked by his distant, identically-dressed neighbors that he won’t feel as though he sticks out like a sore thumb, even with the premature white-fade of his hair and the plastic arm. Even with the scars on his face and neck and shoulders that are barely visible under the thick layers of his clothing.

He just wants to fade into the backdrop today. He wants to draw as little attention to himself as he possibly needs to.

He steps from his bedroom into the hall, down the hall and to the top of the staircase, careful as he walks downward over termite-eaten steps, keeping his flesh hand rested lightly on the guardrail. Outside, he can hear the tree branches popping against the side of the cabin in the breeze, the tweeting of birds outside and the soft hiss of the wind through the grass. He grabs his keys and wallet from the bowl on an end table just next to the front door, and he steps outside, draws in a deep breath of frigid autumn air, and locks the door behind him.

His boots thud against the uneven boards of his porch. And the grass, soon after, is soft under his footfalls. He bumps a few empty beer cans on his way to the car, ignores the way that the raccoons have obviously gotten into his trash again and spilled it from the overfilled bags into the yard. He listens instead to the birdsong overhead, to the breeze and the rustling of tree branches, and he decides that he’s going to make the best of today.

_ ‘Maybe you aren’t happy’ _ , is something that Lance has told him on multiple occasions,  _ ‘but you don’t have to be miserable either. You can be something between.’ _

He nears his car, clicking the button on his key toggle to unlock it. And he drags himself into the driver’s seat, sticking the keys in the ignition, fiddling with the rearview mirror and the seat settings before tugging out his seatbelt and fastening it in its place.

He draws in a deep breath, turning the ignition. The car hums to life, the world around him remains quiet and peaceful and serene. 

And he pulls out slowly along the crackling gravel of his makeshift driveway. In short minutes, he turns around and rights himself, his car lurching over the gravel onto the paved street outside of his mini-forested-oasis. There aren’t any other cars on his street today, and there never are, really. Every so often, he might need to pull onto the grassy shoulder to allow a giant tractor to pass, but the roads surrounding the town are never congested with traffic. He’s never passed more than two or three other cars when he ventures from here to there. He doesn’t know how the townsfolk can be so content to exist only within the confines of their community, but rarely, if ever, he sees a single person attempting to leave.

It’s nice though, he finds, to have the roads all to himself. Despite how many hours and days and months and years he’s spent learning all over again how to man a vehicle, he can’t deny the sliver of anxiety that rattles inside of him when he even considers driving in the opposite direction of an oncoming car. 

This town is good for solitude. His therapist thinks that it’s good for his nerves. 

So he enjoys his ride, rolls down his windows and zones out while he traverses the short distance from home to the publishing house where Allura is waiting for him.

Today doesn’t have to be amazing, he knows that.

But it doesn’t have to be horrible either.


	2. Chapter 2

“Shiro! It’s so nice to see you again! It feels like it’s been such a long time since we’ve spoken face-to-face. You’re looking…”

“— _ Tired _ , I know.”

Shiro laughs, fitting himself with his most sincere smile as he shuffles awkwardly in place, holding the briefcase, that he’d only just remembered a few minutes ago that he’d kept stored in the backseat of his car, at his side as though he’d definitely remembered to bring it with him for a real business venture and it absolutely wasn’t just an afterthought that he’d lugged along with him up the sidewalk and the wide stairs into the building for the sole sake of looking like he actually belongs here.

It’s heavy enough that it displaces his weight in an uncomfortable way, and he feels like a little kid playing dress-up as he stands here in the middle of the office with it grasped in his fist. Allura doesn’t seem to notice how self-conscious he’s acting with the weight of it sagging his left side, and she even has the courtesy to ignore the insincerity in his voice as he faux-jokes with her, simply beaming another of her familiar sunny smiles up at him and swiveling on her heel before stepping off in the direction of her office.

He remembers once upon a time when he might have been left standing like an idiot in her dust, but he knows from vivid, humiliating memories that he’s supposed to follow behind her. He does so, too, without more than a brief moment’s hesitation. He slips between the corners of desks placed sporadically about the cluttered office and winds around the jutting edges of water coolers and printers and wilting potted plants, finally spilling out from the labyrinth of modern workroom chaos into a small hallway that leads him towards the frosted-glass windows of Allura’s office. The other rooms lined up in the hall that he passes by are a bathroom and an entrance to an employee break room, a supply closet, and a storage room. Allura is virtually alone on her own private island here, allowed a certain amount of peace and quiet while she pulls the proverbial strings of everyone who works underneath her. The office itself, he remembers from his infrequent visits inside, is quaint and cramped and stuffy on even the best days, but it’s still an accomplishment to own one. It’s still an honor to be rewarded with her own room, separate from the comings and goings of every writer and editor and unpaid intern who takes their turn spinning in the eternal revolving door of small-town journalism.

On the door, painted with a stencil in bold, intimidating font, it reads “EDITOR-IN-CHIEF”.

She shoves it open moments later, obscuring his view of her job title, and slips through the entryway into her office, leaving it ajar for him to ease in behind her. Out of habit, and knowing what’s expected of him, he closes it behind him, coming forward soon after and dropping himself down into the chair in front of Allura’s messy desk. He’s relieved for a fraction of a moment that he can finally set down his briefcase and rest his already-tired arm.

He’s going to need to take a look inside of it later, he thinks. He can’t remember at which point he would have filled it with bricks or 15lb weights or solid rocks, but that’s what it feels like right now. He shouldn’t be so winded from such a short stroll up the front steps and through the printing office, but he still forces himself to stay quiet as he steadies his breath. That, too, of course, is all the fault of the added weight of his briefcase. It has nothing to do with the frankly pitiful amount of exercise that he’s partaken in over the last few years or the slightest hints of a beer gut that he’s caught regretful glimpses of in the mirror in and out of the shower.

He shakes his head, chasing away those thoughts and lacing his fingers together in his lap, raising his eyes over the mountains of paperwork on the surface of Allura’s desk to her pretty face poking out between the stacks. The sunlight outside filters through them from behind her back, illuminating the black ant-like dots of words spotted over their surfaces, the finer details in the fibers of the material, like fingerprints or veins that a person can only notice when paper is held against the sun. Like the way that Shiro used to sometimes raise his fingers to the sky and note the funny way that the light turned his skin red and orange for that single moment as it scored through the semi-transparency of his own skin and veins and bone.

The patterns that he finds when the sun hits each paper aren’t nearly as intricate as his cardiovascular system, of course, but he still finds himself interested in the imperfections in each sheet. Interested enough that for a long moment, he finds himself staring at documents, and Allura allows him to dredge out this awkward silence for so long that he almost forgets why he came here in the first place.

But after that, once she’s had her fill of it, Allura clicks her nails against the desk, shuffling a few files around with her other hand. Finally, she tuts, procuring a smaller stack from somewhere within the monstrous piles and miraculously not knocking any of them over. They wobble somewhat, like a real-life version of Jenga, precarious and heart-throbbing and mundanely riveting enough that Shiro notices himself holding the breath that he just seconds ago managed to catch. But Allura pays that no mind either, instead, angling herself around the piles and passing him a single manilla folder that’s stuffed with enough documents that the binding has been stretched and bent strangely and creased up in different places.

It flaps in his grip when she passes it off to him, some pages within it slipping through and floating to the carpet at his feet. Two turned face-down and one face-up—a photo of a cow laying on its side in weedy grass, so overexposed by the camera’s flash that it looks to be nothing but a white body and black liquid splashed around it, a strange, lengthy gap between its jaw and throat that his brain can’t quite put together until he leans forward to grab it and realizes that…

It’s been decapitated. Its spinal cord stretches out between the head and shoulders like the last thread left to connect both pieces together. Dark blood pools the grass around its body. Its dull, black eyes stare blindly out into a distance far beyond the photographer in front of it, perpetually terrified with an open, slack mouth and a rot-bloated purple tongue, and maggots and flies swarmed around the torn edges of its carcass like a thousand little rhinestones. Shiro’s stomach turns. His breath catches once again in his throat. His fingers hesitate just before they touch the glossy surface of the photograph, before he crunches it haphazardly in his fist. Images bubble up in the back of his memories of dark eyes and blood and a broken windshield and glass floating through the air like a hundred tiny diamonds, like a halo surrounding a pulverized car, but—

The paper crinkles in his hands. He gulps in a deeply, snatching up the other two photographs and sitting up so stiffly and suddenly that his head swims.

Allura eyes him for a moment, biting the inside of her lip. She sighs then, easing back in her seat with a scrape of the wheels on the floor and swiveling around to stare through the open window behind her. The gray sky is cluttered with clouds this morning, and he wonders if he should have packed an umbrella before he left, or if at one point he might have forgotten one in his car. He wonders why Allura might have tasked him with this job in the first place, a mystery clearly related to cattle death or… something violent and ugly that at no point has he ever expressed an affinity for. He understands that he’s never explicitly stated that he’s _ against  _ covering gore, sure, but his forte in the paper is fluff pieces and advice columns and piddly bullshit that’s forgotten moments after it’s consumed. He likes to think at times that his job is more about selling a denser product at the lower price, churning out the metaphorical iceberg lettuce of this journalistic sandwich that’s really nothing but crunchy water if anyone were to look close enough.

He doesn’t feel as though he’s misrepresenting himself or his talent level, not really. He doesn’t think that he’s more necessary to this company than any intern who could potentially spit out 150 coherently strung-together words.

So he doesn’t understand, feels stalled for a long moment as his brain struggles to shove away the mingling images of that dead cow and the sparkling glass and the bloodied face of a man next to him in the passenger’s seat of a pulverized car. He can’t even begin to piece together why Allura would hand him such an important case when only a third of the articles that he submits to her are actually credited to his real name.

Lance had told him years ago, days before he’d submitted his application and met Allura himself,  _ “The boss is smarter than she is attractive.” _ And he’d wolf-whistled in that vulgar, irritating way that he knew that Shiro disliked.  _ “But man, she’s the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen.” _

And thinking back on that, he wonders if perhaps it’s better if he just doesn’t question it. If, instead, he accepts the fact that Allura knows something about him and this case that he could never hope to grasp, and that she’s not going insane or making a bad call. That, instead, maybe this will be okay. He won’t fumble the article and make the paper look bad. He won’t choke the very first time that she ever throws him a curveball, because Lord knows that he definitely owes her a lot of favors for how many chances she’s given him over the years.

It can’t be that bad. One dead cow in a farming town isn’t even remotely abnormal. This is coyote country. This is the kind of place where farmers allow their dogs to roam free day and night. He just wasn’t expecting the first photo, and for all he knows, this important article that she’s assigning to him personally could be nothing but another reminder that cars should be mindful when traversing the streets at night because one can never know if an animal has managed to break out of its pen. 

As Allura continues watching the slow crawl of the gray clouds over the gray sky, Shiro loosens his grasp on the photo of the cow corpse in his hand, smoothing it out face-down on the folder before tucking it back inside.

Slowly, with bated breath, he turns over the second one. It’s more innocuous, just black stains on the grass outside of a wide, faded red barn. The paint itself is cracked and peeling. The grass under the black ink or tar or oil—whatever it is, Shiro can’t be sure from low-quality photos alone—is browned and withering, died away in a shape that looks almost like a human body lying in the fetal position long enough to clear a path for themselves there. He lifts it closer to his eyes, studying the black and the dying grass, the splintered bullet holes in the side of the barn, the chipping red paint.

“That case is an odd one,” Allura tells him then, just as he’s tucking the second photograph back into the folder and ghosting his fingers over the last one, “but there isn’t a lot of information available about it yet. I felt that your penchant for storytelling might be able to make something worthwhile out of it. The police have agreed to work closely with us if we can caution the townspeople to be careful at night without alarming them. They believe that it might be a wolf or some kind of hybrid: dangerous, for now, just for cattle, but we’re still not sure what it’s capable of. There’s just so much uncertainty involved—”

She turns to catch his gaze again, joyless with deep, tired circles haloed under her eyes. With frazzled, unwashed hair tied back in a tight bun atop her head, and clothes so wrinkled and stretched out that he wonders how many nights now she’s slept at the office just to catch up with whatever workload is giving her trouble. 

“I don’t like it one bit, Shiro, so please be careful. I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a few interviews for you at the Garrett Diner tomorrow, starting at noon. With Officer Thace who took the first of the cattle mutilation cases, then with Detective Ulaz who received the call about the wolf sightings. It should be simple enough. We get the word out, the police collect their calls. We wipe our hands of it. Do you feel that you’re up to the task?”

Shiro nods, deflating somewhat as he flicks his gaze to the still downturned photo in his hands.

He flips the photo, offers Allura some weak confirmation in the form of a feeble hum, and he wonders, as he looks at the glossy surface of it, over-saturated and washed out in the light of the flash—

They’re wolf tracks preserved in dried mud. Big ones, wide and deep with thick claws puncturing far into the soil.

But further away, just a little way up the trail where the flash’s light dims and the corner of the photograph cuts him off.

Among the droplets of dark black ink or oil or tar…

Why do those last prints almost look… human?

* * *

He’d spent the remainder of his morning and early to late afternoon wandering about town. He’d stopped by the diner to thumb through his photographs and files, ordering a plate of chocolate-topped crepes and a black coffee as he’d made himself comfortable in an empty booth at the back of the restaurant.

He’d eaten half of his meal before he’d found the nerve to shove the police reports and witness testimonies out of the way and study the remainder of the photographs. He’d found more puddles of that strange, dried inky black  _ something _ . He’d found pictures of bark splintered from the sides of trees. The footprints at each scene were so varied that he’d really had no idea how the authorities had settled on wolf attacks above anything else. At times, they’d found nothing at all, others were accompanied only by hoof-prints left unaccounted for or dark feathers so broad and long that he couldn’t think of a single native bird with a wingspan so large. 

But every scene was connected by the same similar mutilations. Never twice at the same place, sometimes horses or sheep or indoor-outdoor pets that had, unfortunately, wandered too far away from home. He’d shielded the photos with his arm from a waitress who had come to refill his empty coffee cup, and she’d laughed at him, jutting out one hip and swinging the coffee pot just a little bit too precariously in front of her for his sense of safety.

“You don’t have to protect me from anything, sweetheart,” she’d told him. “I know all about that monster that’s killin’ all the sheep and cows. My brother-in-law’s one of the farmers that got hit. You’ll find him in there—Sal, yeah, son of a bitch killed his dog, too. We thought it was some sicko teenagers or devil worshipers or something. They found bite marks at the poor thing’s throat. Said they looked like they were made by human teeth. Can you believe that? Giant wolfhound mix, big sweetheart with the kids but vicious if he felt threatened by anything. Just mowed down by some criminal and eaten alive. Gives me the creeps.”

He’d had the good sense, at least, to ask for her contact information and jot down some notes. He’d told her that he’d do his best to shed some light on the case and help the police catch the person involved. But he’d wondered about that too, why a case like that would even be affiliated with the cattle killings when all signs pointed to a human perp. As he looked through all of the evidence, the differing bite patterns in the flesh, the various number of victims, the different footprints—everything tied together solely by the black ink found in rotting circles of grass, the similar means of mutilation and the fact that each started cropping up around the same time—he had trouble connecting everything together. 

And he’d wondered, too, if perhaps that waitress might not have been too far off when she’d alleged the existence of a cult. It wasn’t the most easily digestible theory, especially in a tiny, close-knit town where everyone knew everyone by first, last, and middle name. The townsfolk might reject it completely if he were to propose it, which even then, he hadn’t felt even the slightest inclination to do. They’d say that it wasn’t the sort of thing that happened there, always somewhere else. The local kids were good kids. The adults were honest, hard workers. A town like theirs didn’t breed Satanists or cultists. That was the sort of thing that only cropped up in big, Godless cities.

But without that idea to lean on, he hadn’t had the slightest idea what could have possibly been behind it. He’d known that most supposed herbivores weren’t above consuming blood under the right circumstances, and he’d known that a deer was just as likely to attack a human as a coyote was. But at the first crime scene, they’d found the feathers, large, hefty onyx-colored things like soft black holes that sucked in even the brightest spotlight around them. That was a cow, he remembered. The second incident involved goats, accompanied by the large hoof-prints. And at the third scene, they’d found more, but different, hooves, when the dog was slain. At the fourth, where a farmer claimed to have shot a wolf that was attempting to break into his barn after it had mutilated one of his sheep, there had been canine footprints, which the police hadn’t considered to be particularly unusual as they lined up perfectly with the farmer’s story. And that left him off at last night.

The inky fluid found at every scene had drizzled further from the barn into the woods, but ultimately disappeared among the branches and overgrown forest flora, and there hadn’t been an easy way to track where it had gone after that. The police had attempted to use scent dogs, but they’d become uncontrollable the moment that they were given a sample of the creature’s smell. 

He was led in circles that looped wildly and wound between each other. He found himself jotting down the same words and the same sequences of events again and again until somehow each of them felt more tangibly related.

_ Black fluid, animal deaths, weird tracks. The creature is probably wounded. It might be dead already. It hunts once every few days, has been active for two weeks now. If it lived, it’ll probably hunt again the day after tomorrow. There are three untouched farms, all on opposite sides of town. There are no correlations between each farm that’s been attacked so far. They’re all in different locations and run by different farmers. They all raise different animals. None of them use similar supply companies and sell to different distributors.  _

He’d spent hours toiling over the paperwork and putting together the beginning stages of his article. He’d sent Allura a few fleeting excerpts and asked questions about the length and the position in the paper. She’d reassured him that it wasn’t front page material quite yet, and he didn’t need to worry about crafting the most riveting piece that the town would be hinged on for a week straight until the next edition was released, and he’d sighed in relief. He’d jotted down more information, kept himself distracted through five cups of coffee refilled by a changing shift of waitresses until the rain pattering against the window next to him drew his attention away to the slow descent of the sun outside.

He sat up straighter then, shaking out the last of his nerves and collected his things. He’d checked the time and sighed in resignation when he realized that he’d only have an hour or so to collect his groceries before the store closed.

He’d risen, packed up, and left a few dollars on the table. He’d stopped by the counter to pay his bill.

And now, just forty-five minutes later, he finds himself idly studying the expiration dates on different gallons of milk in the grocery store, trying desperately to remember what color the label was on the jug the last time that he remembered to pick some up from the store.

He knows with certainty that it can’t be whole milk. That would be entirely too thick and frothy for his cereal, too many calories, too much fat. He suspects that it can’t be skim either, but between one and two percent, he’s totally lost. Tethered by these two possibilities until he remembers, belatedly, that Lance brought the milk last time and the label wasn’t dark blue, but… the lighter shade.

He celebrates this victory privately, grabbing a jug by the handle and setting it in his cart. It’s a relief then to pull himself from the chill of the cooler and to shove his cart away from the dairy aisle in search of a loaf of bread and… peanut butter or something. He’s had such a long day today that he can barely even remember what he usually eats when he doesn’t feel like driving into town.

He collects a few more things—cheese in a can that he promises himself that he’ll consume completely before Lance visits and gives him another firm talking to about eating right, garlic-flavored crackers and sour cream and onion chips, of course, accompanied by sour cream and onion dip. He grabs another case of beer, and decides to treat himself with a few bottles of wine and some spirits and tequila. Then vodka just to tide him over until next time. He hesitates at the end of the alcohol aisle before grabbing another six-pack of beer and adding it to the pile as well, before he decides that he’s done all of the shopping that he can for one night.

He’ll be back in town tomorrow anyway. So he can get other things when he’s more coherent.

The cashier gives him a pointed look when he hoists his alcoholic bounty onto the belt behind his pitiful amount of food, but he elects to ignore it. He smiles at her instead, sheepish and hot around the ears as he pats his jacket and finds his wallet in his breast pocket. She situates everything in a few brown paper bags that he loads into his cart carefully. He pays and wishes her a good night, and he can’t shake the feeling of her eyes burning holes into his back as he makes his way to the exit.

But he tells himself that he shouldn’t worry about her opinion anyway. He’s sure that she knits or tunes in to some television program religiously. Maybe she golfs or bird-watches or gambles on her days off. Maybe she buys the discount donuts from the bakery at the end of the night and stuffs her face with them alone in the parking lot in the stripes of shadows between the street lamps. No human is without their vices, no person without their unique cross to bear, and the guilty things that thread each moment together to get them through the days until, eventually, they die.

The rain is falling heavier when he slips through the automatic doors. He picks up the speed of his steps, regretting that he didn’t wear a jacket with a hood or even bother to check the weather report for the day, or fumble through the mess in his car for an umbrella that he knows that he must have forgotten in there at some point.

It’s black outside too, the rain having zapped the final light from the sky and the clouds situated in front of the setting sun, blotting out the last remaining rays of it.

The puddles at his feet remind him too painfully of those black stains on the rotting grass in the police polaroids. The darkness reminds him too vividly of how overexposed and hyper-saturated he’d look if someone were to snap the same kind of photo of him, now, as he unlocks his trunk and begins piling his bags inside.

His head throbs for a fraction of a second as the image of a body bag flitters through the tight cage clamping off intrusive memories in the back of his brain. Black like a trash bag, shiny and slick and distended at odd angles in the vague shape of the human stuffing hiding beyond the surface of it. Glass shattered like a million distant stars and flooded with red and black on the sizzling pavement. The camera flash. The whispering, someone wailing in agony in his ears, too close to be anyone but himself.

Those dead, wide cow eyes. Someone next to him, their face flattened and their nose broken and leaking scarlet like a sink turned full blast.

He shudders a desperate, quaking breath. He braces himself on the side of his car and drops the bag in his arms thoughtlessly into his trunk, not caring now when the bottles spill out and clatter together on the floor of it. He collects himself and forces back those mental images. He reaches up to grope at the spot where his flesh meets the firm outer shell of his prosthetic and reminds himself, one time out of what must be a million by now, that he’s alive and he has been for a decade since that day. And that for better or worse, he’ll never be back there again.

He shoves the last bag into his trunk, slamming down the lid.

It’s even colder tonight than it was this morning, and he suffers through the icy spitting of the rain as he walks his cart back to the corral.

His car clicks as he hits the unlock button on his keychain toggle and his pants drag uncomfortably with wetness against the leather seat when he hauls himself inside. He flips on his high-beams, unable to remember if they’re optimal for driving in night-rain or not, but finds that he has no trouble seeing anything immediately in front of the car regardless.

He creeps his vehicle slowly through the damp parking lot, rubbing tiredly at his eyes and wondering if any of the local coffee shops are awake this late in the evening and if he could stop somewhere on his way home to grab himself something appropriately caffeinated.

But he thinks that he still has some of that nice Brazilian coffee that Lance brought home for him from his trip to the marijuana dispensaries in Portland, Oregon. Shiro had immediately stashed away the pipe that he’d been gifted after that trip as well, admiring the craftsmanship required for the glassblower to make the bowl resemble octopus tentacles, but absolutely horrified that Lance would see something like weed paraphernalia and think that he’d be interested in owning it. He’d told Lance that he hadn’t smoked since college and he wasn’t exactly in a position where he wanted to pick it up again. He’d tried desperately to keep the mortification out of his voice, but Lance’s lips had turned up slyly at the edges in that way that they always did when he was up to no good and he knew that Shiro was bothered by it.

Lance had guffawed loudly, kicking back and downing a long swig of the beer that Shiro had offered him when he’d come in. He’d watched the gentle way that Shiro held the pipe between his fingers and set it carefully on the kitchen table between them, as though the tentacles were capable of untangling themselves from the edges of the bowl and ensnaring his fingers.

“You like weird stuff like that, so I thought you’d appreciate it. You’re the one who always talks about how much you’d like to boink an alien or whatever, right? I thought it suited you—drug paraphernalia or not.”

He’s still mad about that, even thinking about it now. He grips the steering wheel a little bit tighter, blowing out sharply through his nose as he contemplates, for a moment, how easily Lance has been able to assume the role of the annoying little brother that he’d never actually had in the past. He knows that he can become somewhat  _ passionate  _ about his space-related tirades while he’s drinking, that he’s taken part in a few slurred rants about how much life must exist somewhere in the deepest reaches of space and how miraculous it might be to someday be able to meet a real non-human, sentient creature in the flesh, but…

As far he as can recall, he’s never so much as insinuated that he’d ever considered having sex with an alien. He still has no idea how Lance could have gotten to that conclusion, where he could have conjured up that humiliating and totally incorrect idea of who Shiro is as a person, but it sure has managed to embed itself firmly just under the surface of his skin.

Yeah, sure, the tentacles on that stupid weed pipe were cool, but only because he’d never had any idea that weed pipes could even  _ look  _ cool. He’d have appreciated it just as much if it were a spider or a pretty flower or a cloud. It was the craftsmanship. Not the subject matter.

He continues to tell himself this as he veers his car through the quiet, damp night. He focuses all of his attention on his internal goings-on, ignoring the black mass of trees stood tall like massive bookends on each side of the highway, or the dense darkness that’s cloaked over everything in his path. The road ahead is an endless straight path of spilled ink. The sky is tar, the trees are voids beckoning him further and further along his route back home. He’s torpedoed anger, concentrated annoyance and shame and embarrassment and agonizing confusion all rolled into one supermassive black hole of pent-up energy. 

Why does Lance have to play the role of a little brother so well when Shiro barely knows how to act like a person? Why is he so charming and likable and funny and carefree and why does he waste his time on someone as emotionally inept as Shiro knows that he can be? And why does Allura pass these amazing opportunities on to him when he does nothing but inconvenience her? Why is anyone kind to him when they can so clearly see what a monumental fuck-up he is? Why does he continue prattling on like a moron and wasting everyone else’s time when it would be so much easier for everyone if he just—

If he… just…

He realizes with a terrified jerk of the wheel that he’s pushing just a little bit too hard on the gas. The car flies so chaotically over the highway that the wheels lift a fraction of an inch from the asphalt when he passes over a bump. He’s fretful and jittery as he eases his foot away from the pedal, as he’s careful not to pump the gas too hard when he remembers all of those dumb driver’s ed videos that he watched in high school about hydroplaning. The car slows gradually to a safer crawl. He drums his fingers against the steering wheel to vent the last tendrils of his anxiety. Slowly, as the night around him continues to pass but the scenery stays virtually the same, he finds himself lost, again, in thought. Rain continues to tap against the windows and the roof. It grows only heavier the further into the belly of the highway night that he draws. 

He thinks about Lance, on his trip out to Denver, Colorado at the moment, to write an exclusive  exposé about some string of murder mysteries that he’s planning to release this weekend for Halloween. He thinks about how, reliably, he’ll surely find himself situated in Shiro’s kitchen within hours of his arrival home, flanked by a giant rolling suitcase filled with all of his research papers and souvenirs. The two of them will spend the rest of the evening into the night going through everything that he learned and threading it together into a palatable article. Shiro will make coffee, at first, but later, he’ll grab both of them a beer from the fridge. Lance will tell him about the scenery and he’ll talk about the people who he interviewed and he’ll hand Shiro some trinkets or articles of clothing or food that he picked out just for him. Shiro will tell him about the disappearances and Lance will weigh in with his usual bad advice.

And Shiro will find himself lost again in the smallest reprieve from his ordinary routine, in the form of Lance’s presence in his kitchen, and himself, taking time away from his own assignments to pre-check all of Lance’s work before he sends it off to Katie for more official editing. 

Lance’s pieces are particularly popular with the readers, Shiro knows. But Lance went to college for journalism and this is his dream, not something that he simply fell into accidentally. Shiro finds himself not intimidated by him or jealous, even, but just proud of him each time that he achieves something. Just thankful, strangely, that Lance had the goodness of heart to put in a good word for him way back then, when Shiro knew that he was completely unfit to be employed anywhere, really. On the beginning fringes of alcoholism, in the depths of despair and newly-released from his third hospital visit in a long series that would dominate his early-to-mid twenties as the doctors attempted to remove the final shreds of shrapnel from his skin, he understands now that Lance put his neck out for him, but—

Suddenly, lightning-fast, he spots the daunting form of something darker black against the night, planted firmly and unmoving in place and obscuring the illuminated lines on the road just some hundred yards ahead of his speeding car.

He slams on his brakes. The car spins in place, pinballing between each steep dip of the road into the ditches flanking its sides as he struggles to regain control. He’s gripping the wheel tightly now, breathing deeply with a chest so pained that it nearly feels as though his heart has leaped out of his chest. But he stops, eventually, skitters to a jittery halt with his headlights miraculously pointed in the right direction, bleeding light over a giant mass of darkness that’s sitting, still dead and unmoving, in the middle of the road.

It’s big enough that he knows that it would have caught under his car and maybe even overturned him if he’d failed to notice it and run over it. It looks like a fallen tree trunk, at first, or the shiny mass of trash bags stacked together in the center of the road. Memories flood the back of his thoughts again, but he grasps his chest tightly, shaking his head violently back and forth and chasing away any intrusive thought that struggles to wriggle through the tight, iron cage at the back of his brain. 

He takes a moment longer to compose himself, leaning back in the seat and releasing his tight fists from the steering wheel as though it’s a live wire that he’s just managed to disentangle himself from. His heart pounds wildly, growing slower only when he scrambles to breathe evenly, to recite the mantra that his therapist taught him years ago, when he’d first started attending their meetings and he’d grappled with the concept of even being a  _ passenger _ in a vehicle after…

Well, an event that, right now, will remain nothing but a big blip in his brain that he’s painted over with white-out so many times that he can’t even decipher the words scribbled underneath. 

He tells himself: _ I am safe. I am in control. I am not in danger. _ And he watches the black spot on the rain-dampened road between the clearing of the overhanging trees. He studies the way that the rain soaks into the matted, thick curls of hair that stick up in all directions from its body. It’s an animal, he knows, probably mowed down or clipped hard enough by a passing car that it died before it managed to drag itself to safety. Maybe another victim of that mysterious creature that’s been attacking cattle. Maybe just a coyote or a deer or someone’s beloved dog that trespassed accidentally into the path of some hunter’s shotgun.

He’s still a good 20 yards away from it, distant enough that he can’t tell if its humongous form is still rising and falling as it breathes or if it’s completely motionless. But he’s near enough that he recognizes the muddy puddle of watered-down blood staining the road beneath it, that he understands that it’s large and wide and “in the way” enough that he isn’t going to be able to squeeze his car around it, and that anyone who comes through here later might not notice it at all.

He flips on his hazard lights, shifting his gear into park. And he shoves out of the door into the heavy downpour of the frigid rain, shivering almost immediately as each droplet of near-ice stabs into the bare stretches of his skin.

He approaches it slowly, hands shoved in his pockets to protect them from the cold. It’s somehow even more enormous up close, all bales of wild, wiry black hair and giant, dense paws that he sees only when he comes within a few feet of its, still motionless, body. He drops down to his knees, fumbling around in his pockets until he finds his phone and activates the flashlight app, shining the light on the body to supplement the shine of his headlights, beamed onto his back. It’s so large that it seems almost wolfish, definitely some kind of canine just by the look of the blunt, heavy claws and the wide, flat feet. He makes out the shape of its long, bushy tail, the arch of its spine under piles and piles of matted, stringy, wet hair. And he eases closer, even still, his pulse in his throat when he skirts around it and points his light where he thinks that the head must be situated.

He almost expects to find it decapitated, mutilated like all of those cattle and the indoor-outdoor pets. But he’s surprised, so shocked that he flails and tumbles onto his backside and scoots himself further away, dropping his phone and crying out wildly, as he finds himself met not by an empty spot on shoulders where a neck should be, but a terrifying, large head raised and dark eyes watching him, and pointed ears turned forward as this supersized wolf of a dog regards him calmly and quietly with its jowls still secured safely over its many razor teeth.

He scrambles forward and grasps his phone, cursing as it slips through his wet and mud-caked palms. He springs to his feet, edging off by a few meters and extending his arm to point the light of his phone through the rain and the dark and directly into the squinting eyes of the dog, still watching him.

It doesn’t make a move as though it’s trying to get up. It twitches somewhat, shifting its wide hips, but… when Shiro looks downward, he notices the strange, unnaturally contorted direction of its hindquarters. They’ve been broken, he can tell. The dog’s dense plume of a tail wags feebly and it whines, looking up at him and vibrating in a way that reminds him of all of the dog characters that he’s seen in kid’s movies over the years. Excited and trying desperately to communicate some kind of message. Eager as though any second now he’ll tug a treat from his pocket to feed it.

He bites his lip.

He disables the flashlight on his phone and shoves it back inside his pocket. And he rubs his hands together, rolling forward and back on his feet and peering into the black wall of distance beyond his car as though another pair of headlights might shine through the night any moment now and someone else will join him here who might know what to do.

But no one miraculously appears. No savior parts the darkness and draws nearer to this scene, where he finds himself alone with a defenseless, injured animal that is so terrifyingly gargantuan that he knows, without a doubt, that it could kill him with one snap of its mighty jaws lined with numerous long, spaded rows of teeth.

He rolls his shoulders, turning his eyes slowly over the wet, black road and the black wall of the trees around him, to the black dog, watching him without averting its gaze and wagging its tail weakly, still wiggling its hind legs as though it might soon be able to rise to its feet and run away. 

He turns back to his car, repeating his mantra again and again as he walks to the back and opens the door, collecting a blanket that he remembers stowing back there when he’d gone to the drive-in movie theater with Lance and Allura and they needed a vehicle bigger than Lance’s two-door or Allura’s sports car to fit all three of them comfortably. 

He grabs that, and finds just one of the thick safety gloves that he’d stored here just in case he ever needed them in the winter. He places that over his flesh hand, peering around the door at the dog, still waiting for him, as though it might kindly disappear and rid him of any responsibility to make a decision and commit to a plan of action when no path that he could take tonight feels exactly right.

It stays in place though, unfortunately. He resigns him to the very stupid, reckless thing that he’s just about to do.

He makes his way back to the dog, spreading the blanket out in his arms and trying to decide exactly what the best way would be to scoop up a dog that, as far as he can tell, would surely be able to stare face-to-face with him while standing on its hind legs. He isn’t sure how heavy it might be, with the thickness of its wild fur and the sheer reach of its limbs. He doesn’t even know if it’ll allow him to touch it, but he knows that he has to do something. He knows that if he leaves it here and tries to call the non-emergency line, it might take precious hours for the right people to get here and it might not even survive. He sucks in a breath, chewing on his bottom lip and stopping just a few inches from the dog’s contorted body as he continues holding the slowly-dampening blanket in front of him.

“O-okay, uh… buddy,” he says awkwardly, already feeling like the biggest idiot in the universe but unsure about what he should really do and how even the professionals might go about capturing an animal in this kind of situation. “Uh, I… I know you’re hurt, but I wanna help you, okay? I’m going to put his blanket around you and carry you into my car. But I don’t know if that’ll aggravate your wounds, so… I’m sorry if I hurt you, but I promise, you’re going to be okay. I’m going to take you somewhere where they can take care of you.”

The dog continues watching him. It tips its head to the side, its tall ears swiveling back to lay flat against its skull before it puffs out a single breath and rests its head on the ground between its front paws. He swallows, shifting from one foot to the other before crouching down, finally, and dropping the blanket on top of it.

It doesn’t react, doesn’t give him any indication that it even notices the new, wet weight on top of it. So he shuffles closer, reaches out a single hand, and carefully rests it in the center of the blanket. He can feel the heat and the fluffiness of its fur underneath, but it pays him little mind. He eases closer, tucking one edge of the blanket under its belly, then the other, under its back.

He counts to three, grits his teeth—

And in one single motion, he scoops it up, stumbles as he lifts himself to stand, and readies himself for the pain of those giant, sharp teeth buried defensively in his skin.

But seconds pass and nothing happens. He feels nothing but the wet and warmth and the give of the soft fur of the dog in his arms, the chill of the freezing rain, and his own heart beating painfully in his chest. He hears nothing but the dog’s labored breathing and the pattering around him, and his “door ajar” alarm beeping some ways away from inside of his car.

He shuffles backward, deciding that he doesn’t want to test his luck more than he already has, or dither here long enough that the dog grows tired of it and decides to bite him just for something to do. He rounds his car and squeezes the top half of his body through the door, easing the dog gently down into the seat.

And he stops then, studying its heaving body that takes up a good 3/4ths of his backseat. He makes sure that the tail is fully inside before he grasps the door, and he smiles down at it, feeling strangely touched that despite everything, it seemed to understand his motivations and did nothing, so far, to make this harder than it needed to be.

“Good boy,” he says. “You’re gonna be okay. I promise.”

He shuts the door.

And once he finds himself comfortably situated in the driver’s seat, he pulls his phone out of his pocket again and searches the number of the closest animal hospital online.

There’s one hospital within a 25-mile radius of his current location, and the hours say that they’re closing in less than ten minutes. His fingers shake as he dials the digits, and he closes his eyes, gritting his teeth and praying desperately, silently, as he listens to the line trilling.

“This is Lion’s Cove Animal Hospital—”

“Yes, yes, sorry. Hello. I saw online that you’re closing soon—”

“I can make an appointment for your pet tomorrow if you’d like.”

“N-no, sorry, I, uh… I was driving, and… there’s a dog. I have a dog in my car that was hit or… something. It’s bleeding bad and I think its legs are broken. I’m so sorry, but—but do you think you could—”

“Can you get here within the next hour?”

“Y-yes, I… I think so.”

“Okay, that’s fine then. Get it here within the next hour, and we can squeeze you in.”

The line clicks before he can finish voicing his thank you. He hastily types the address into the GPS on his dash, flipping off his hazard lights and switching into reverse, as instructed by the path forged for him on the screen.

He catches the eyes of the dog that continues to watch as he backs up and cranes around to study the solid wall of the night behind his car. He flicks his gaze beyond it, feeling strangely put on the spot but avoiding the mere concept that this dog is anything but a dog. That, in any possible way, it could be thinking something more as it’s watching him than about pain or fear or trust, or any emotions within the limited range of feelings that he thinks that a normal dog can feel.

He retraces his path from earlier, knowing that he’ll spend the vast majority of his trip following this same road until he reaches town. The dog continues to watch him, he can see its ears perked up and listening intently in the rearview mirror. He can hear the chugging of its pained breathing and can see the small, black pebbles of its eyes catching the light each time that he finds himself distractedly meeting them in his reflection.

He doesn’t know why he starts talking, but it might just be the residual nerves. He’s always found that filling the silence has helped him in the past, that it gives him some semblance of control over whatever emotions he might be feeling in a specific situation if he can distract himself vocally with something else.

And it’s not like this dog can understand him anyway, or if he can remember correctly, that speaking sweetly to an animal can do anything but make it feel more comfortable around him. But he talks to it midway down the path to the hospital, softly, at first, then growing bolder and unabashed. Feeling an odd sensation that he compares privately, embarrassed, to the brief experiences that he had in confession during his fleeting stint at a Catholic boy’s home in his youth.

Speaking to a creature that listens but never judges. Voicing even his silliest of thoughts and memories to someone who won’t ever be able to tell another soul.

“I’ve always liked dogs,” he tells it. “I used to like those movies with the talking dogs or the people who get turned into dogs or just… any dog movie, really, when I was younger. I’ve never been very good with people, but animals have always liked me, at least. There’s less involved in being friends with an animal. You pet it, give it treats. It loves you because you’re nice to it, and you don’t have to worry about being good at sports or saying the right thing or being attractive.”

He laughs dryly, running his fingers through his damp hair, squeezing out some of the wetness before patting it down and dropping his hand back to the wheel.

“When I was a kid, I used to sneak out of this group home where I lived after—well, just… a group home, where I lived with a lot of other boys around my age. The latch on the back door was broken, so even though we weren’t exactly allowed to go into the back yard and mess with the neighbor’s fence, if I was especially quiet, I figured out that I could slip out there at some point between dinner and bed and pet the neighbor’s dog before anyone even noticed that I was gone.”

Shiro slides one hand down the edge of the steering wheel, allowing it to rest between the leather and his cold and damp thigh. He listens to the soft panting of the dog in the back seat, the stiff and heavy way that each breath sounds as though it’s aching somewhere under that thick fur, through the wound that’s left warm blood stained on Shiro’s arms and the front of his shirt. He catches its black eyes in the mirror, startled for a moment when he realizes that it’s still watching him intently, as though there’s any way that it could possibly understand what he’s telling it now. As though it would have any reason to care, even if it could put meaning to his words.

But it feels good to talk right now, while it’s so dark and the rain pounding against the top of his car is so heavy and loud that it’s driving nervous jitters under his skin. The dog watches and Shiro focuses on the empty road illuminated through the heavy rain by his headlights, and he sucks in another deep breath before he continues.

“It was a giant muscular thing, the neighbor’s dog. He always kept the poor thing on a chain that he’d mounted to a tree, but it was just close enough that it could lick my fingers if I slipped them through the slots between the fence beams. And I did sometimes, at first. It was a good dog and sometimes I’d sneak bread or pork steak from dinner in my pocket and I’d feed it through the fence. It started coming closer then, waiting for me to come to see it, even if I didn’t have any food. I think it was lonely, and I was lonely too. And I always thought that if it was still around when I grew up, maybe I’d come back and steal it and we’d run away together—two lonely creatures that the world just didn’t appreciate enough.”

He laughs again, wetter and heavier and deeper in his throat, avoiding the dog’s dark eyes in the rearview mirror, telling himself that he’s only glancing up there to check through the back window for oncoming traffic. It’s solid slate, nothing but raindrops trailing over the glass. Nothing but the dog’s spaded ears stuck straight up and listening attentively and those beady eyes framed with bushy hair that’s slowly growing thicker and fluffier and more tangled as it dries. 

“Its name was Keith, that dog. He was a good boy. He let me tug on his collar so I could see the tag there, but I never thought the name suited him much. He was big and block-headed and he was practically a teddy bear, but he didn’t seem like a Keith.”

The road ahead of him winds endlessly, just as it had earlier when he’d driven over it in the opposite direction. The backlit GPS screen on his dash tells him that he still has another fifteen minutes before he reaches the animal hospital.

“But I grew up, and I was shuffled out of the group home into foster care. I lost touch with the staff there and anyone who knew me, or that particular home, or that neighbor and his dog. Until I met one of my old housemates at the grocery store by chance when I was in college. He’d lived in the group home until he aged out and worked as a grocer there, at that store. I couldn’t—I just couldn’t focus on what he was telling me about his life as an adult or his job or… anything. I just kept thinking about that poor old dog, Keith. I needed to know that he was okay. I just… I needed to know that I didn’t let him down by leaving him behind.”

His insides churn and his eyes feel prickly and hot, and the dog continues to watch him intensely, unwavering, with its giant paws crossed in front of it over the cushion of his backseat.

“He told me that Keith got out just a few weeks after I left. He attacked a kid in the street, ripped the fingers on his hand clean off, nearly killed him after. So… they put him down. He was a “danger to society”, everyone said. He wasn’t fit to survive. And I wondered about him for a long time after that—why he never hurt me, never growled or bared his teeth. Why he only wagged his tail and whined until I reached through the fence and pet him. If maybe I was just good with animals, or… if maybe Keith and I just understood each other. He could recognize something in me that he’d always known in himself. Like a mirror in the shape of a kid, or… like two broken pieces of the same puzzle.”

The road is dark and wet and his tires hydroplane ever so slightly before he lifts his foot from the gas, rolling to a slow crawl over the barren highway as the dog’s ears flatten and it bows its head, resting its chin on its paws. It lets out a long and breathy whine, clearly pained and tired, clearly scared and confused and unsure of how it’s supposed to feel right now, trapped in an unfamiliar place with an unfamiliar person who’s speaking to it now in noises that it could never hope to understand. Shiro sighs, combing a hand through his hair and taking a short moment to press the heel of his palm into his eye socket, easing away the headache culminating there. 

“I always wanted a dog,” he says softly, catching the dog’s eyes in the mirror once again, just as its ears perk and it raises its head to watch him. “I always told myself that I’d get one someday and I’d name it Keith, to honor him, I guess. To give his predecessor a better chance at happiness than he was ever allowed to have. But my ex was allergic, then I… I guess I just lost touch with that dream once he died, but… You know, if no one claims you, I’ll come back, okay? Honestly, you look more like a “Keith” than any dog that I’ve ever seen. So… would you like to be my friend? Would you mind living the rest of your life with me?”

He hears an unexpected thumping that, for a moment, startles him. The car swerves just slightly over the solid lines at the center of the road, but Shiro rights himself quickly, willing down the sudden pitch of his pulse and snapping his gaze back to the rearview mirror to study the dog. At first, he tells himself that the noise must have been thunder, but he sees it then, seconds later, in the form of a narrower, longer black mass attached to the dog itself tugging up and smacking gently down onto the seat. It’s a tail, he realizes, wagging. The dog tilts its fluffy head to the side and regards him for a moment longer as the wagging slows and stops. It whines again, resting its chin back on top of its paws. 

And he doesn’t know why he reaches back, why he runs his fingers through the wooly fur between its flattened ears without taking the proper care to even watch it while he touches it to study how it reacts. But it leans up into his touch, nuzzles its cold, wet nose against his palm and practically pets itself on his hand for a moment before it drops its head back down to rest and the soft thudding of its tail against the seat resumes.

He laughs then, just a little, but it’s happy and weightless for the first time that he can remember in a very long time. He laughs because this dog is gigantic and terrifying and he isn’t even entirely certain that it’s not crossbred with some kind of wolf or coyote. But it’s acting now as though it’s never wanted anything but to be domesticated, as though it wants nothing more now than to come home with him and curl up at the foot of his bed.

And he realizes, as he spots the lights of the animal hospital on a distant corner of the endlessly straight highway, that he doesn’t mind the idea of that much either.

Lance is always telling him that he needs company at the cabin. He’s always saying that Shiro should bring someone home with him so they can keep an eye on him.

And maybe this isn’t what he had in mind, but for now, it’s the best that Shiro can do. It’s the most that he can extend himself just to prove to Lance that he’s trying.

It’s not a boyfriend or a lover or even a one-night stand, but a pet, he thinks, is a bigger obligation anyway.

Maybe once the vets mend Keith’s wounds and send him home in ship shape, Shiro will ask them what brands of food might be optimal for a dog so massively sized. Maybe he’ll buy a couple of pet bowls and some toys when he comes back out in a few days to pick him up. Maybe he’s thinking too far ahead, and he stops himself when he realizes it. He still doesn’t know if Keith is microchipped, if he belongs to someone who misses him, and what’s wrong with him in the first place. He still doesn’t know if he’ll live through the night, considering the amount of blood that he’s lost.

It’s long since dried and surely stained into the front of Shiro’s clothes and all over the upholstery in his backseat. It’s cold enough that the wetness on his clothes feels like prickles of ice bled and frozen against his skin. The air conditioning helps nothing, turned on mid-blast only because he’d taken note of the thick, unkempt coat jutting in odd directions from poor Keith’s body and decided that maybe he’d be more comfortable if he didn’t turn on the heat.

Keith barely reacts as the car bumps over the hump of the animal hospital’s parking lot and glides to a slow halt under the flickering neon-lit sign. He twitches his ears momentarily when Shiro turns the key and kills power to the car, raises those dark, beady eyes and watches intently as Shiro clicks his seatbelt and releases it, craning himself around in his seat and wondering if he should go inside and ask for a muzzle in order to move a dog that he isn’t entirely familiar with.

At the door, he can see one of the vets waiting for him. She raises a hand in greeting, looking tired but worried, and he feels a small trickle of guilt slip through his resolve. He’ll have to send tonight’s staff a thank you card and maybe a gift basket. He’ll have to see to it that his next article for the newspaper that involves this place makes room for a glowing review of the establishment. But for now, he needs to focus on bringing Keith inside, getting him signed in, and making sure that he’s safe and comfortable before he goes home for the night.

He swallows shallowly, chewing on the inside of his lip and watching as Keith watches him back, staring at him silently with heavy, strained breathing as though he’s just waiting for Shiro to explain to him what’s going on.

“So, uh, buddy—Keith—” He pretends that it’s not weird how immediately this stray dog perks up upon hearing a name that he was given only within the last ten minutes. “Do you think you could be patient with me for just a little longer? The nice people in the animal hospital are going to take care of you, and I promise that I’ll come back for you after, but… it might hurt when we move you. Can you be good until it’s over? If it means that you can get better and we can live together after you leave this place?”

He doesn’t know why he’s trying to bargain with this dog, or why it seems to work. He chalks it up to feeling just a little bit disoriented after such a long day, to exhaustion and perhaps even the onset of a fever after traipsing around in the rain. 

But he tests it anyway, sliding out of the driver’s seat and rounding the car, and gulping in a final nervous breath before he opens the back passenger door and reaches in with both careful hands to scoop Keith up just as he did when he set him inside.

Keith whines lowly, quiet and pitiful and obviously aching, but he doesn’t react further than that. Shiro tells him what a good dog he is, how brave he is, how proud of him he is that he’s handling this so gracefully, but he worries, too.

He wonders if maybe Keith is dying, if he’s just lost too much blood. If he’s complacent only because he isn’t coherent enough to fight back, and if his animalistic instincts might have told him as far back as when Shiro found him on the road that he wasn’t going to make it anyway, so he might as well conserve his strength and give up.

He doesn’t like thinking like that, shoves that thought far into the back of his head and leaves his car door ajar, ignoring the beeping of the alarm inside of it as he rushes through the rainfall overhead and splashes through the puddles filling potholes in the parking lot in his quick pursuit of the hospital door.

The vet shoves forward and opens it just before he comes close enough to enter. He thanks her frantically, explaining the situation in a rushed and panicked kind of way that might only make sense in his dizzy, tired, terrified thoughts.

But she nods anyway, comforts him and studies Keith in his arms and leads him through the back door into the belly of the hospital, where she walks him through the process of inspecting Keith.

She instructs him to lay Keith down on a pillowy table lined in medical wax paper. She tells him that they’d usually check weight and blood work and many other things for a checkup, but they’ll worry about it in the morning. 

Another vet pops her head into the room, smiling tiredly at Shiro before her attention is temporarily diverted to Keith, bleeding on the table, and the other vet currently feeling around in the thick bales of his fur for the source of the bleeding. Her short and blunted nails are devoid of any polish, her knuckles dry from what Shiro imagines must be strenuous washing between patients. She’s wearing the smallest hint of mascara and eyeliner, but aside from that, her face is clear of makeup, clear of blemishes, but tight in the corners of her eyes and mouth with the faintest beginnings of stress lines that are shadowed deeply in the overbearing light above. 

He turns to meet her as well, just as she opens her mouth and calls him gently out of the room into the hall.

“I need some information,” she tells him. “Your buddy is in good hands, but if you want to say goodbye for now, it’s a good time for that.”

Shiro nods, watching her for a short moment as she eases away from the door and slips further into the hall. She’s fiddling with a clipboard in her hands now, clicking her pen idly in a way that tells him that she’s really just pretending to be distracted for his sake, and when he turns again to Keith on the wax-papered table and the other vet, even she’s pretending to be too busy to eavesdrop as she continues searching for Keith’s wounds.

Her fingers catch in the knotted threads of his hair. She keeps parting it in seemingly random places, her brows low and knitted together as she continues to study the dark blood staining his body and coating her gloves, but there seems to be no wound, no source of it. No reason why he’d be covered in it when his skin, under the hair, is virtually undamaged. 

Shiro eases forward, reaching out slowly and dropping a single hand atop Keith’s head. He scratches between his ears, something deep in his chest pinching as Keith lifts his head weakly and pets himself against his hand again. Shiro leans in closer, finds himself drawn to Keith’s big, dark, tired eyes framed by so much wild, black hair. And he smiles then, in the most convincing and genuine way that he can manage, before dropping his hand to scratch Keith under the chin.

“I have to go now, boy,” he says. “But I’m coming back for you as soon as you’re better, okay? So be good for these nice ladies, and I promise we’ll be together soon.”

That weighty, bushy tail thumps against the wax paper on the table, crinkling it and shoving it around, reverberating the sound through the padding underneath. 

“I’ll see you soon, Keith.”

And he turns then, drawing his hand away, thanking the vet and dragging himself stiffly from the room. He doesn’t turn back to watch Keith, doesn’t allow himself that moment of weakness because, for whatever reason, he suspects that he might not be strong enough to leave if he looks at that poor dog again. He doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know if maybe he’s just tired and he’s had a long day and he poured his heart out to this dying animal alone in his car in a way that he’s never even talked to his therapist during their monthly visits, but…

He feels as though he’s leaving the original Keith behind again, as though he’s walking away now, years later, even though he knows how this story ends. Even though he understands that Keith bled out profusely in his car and there’s no reasonable way that a dog with fur so matted and tangled belongs to someone who loves it, that a stray, surely, wouldn't be so trusting of people unless it was too weak to fight.

He wills down the thickness in his throat and turns his head away from the vet in the hall to dot the wet heat from the corners of his eyes with the edge of his coat sleeve. The blood stained into the front of his clothes is deep black, void-like and absent of any light that might normally catch on it and sparkle or illuminate the texture of dried crust. It’s just black, like he’s a piece of paper drawn on with a heavy marker. Like he’s a cartoon character who’s been shot straight through with a cannonball. As though Keith’s blood has doused him in pure darkness. As though, now, he’s just a deep crater where a person is supposed to be.

He clears his throat, shoving his hands in his coat pockets and offering the vet another soft, manufactured smile.

“You needed me for information?” He asks her, and she nods, motioning for him to follow before leading him through the backroom door towards the front counter once again.

“I just need some information for your file. From the looks of that dog, he’s not yours, right? He’s a stray that you found on the road?”

She slides around the opposite side of the counter and Shiro rounds the front of it. He slips one hand from his pocket and rests it on the counter between them, wondering idly how expensive the price tag of saving Keith’s life might be for him, if they actually don’t manage to find an owner attached to a microchip or anyone willing to answer the found pet ads that they’ll surely run for a week or so once he’s stable.

“Yes,” he says. “I was driving home and found him collapsed in the middle of the highway. I thought he was roadkill at first, so I tried to move him, but then… he was alive. I know it wasn’t responsible for me to touch him, but I couldn’t leave him like that. Especially if someone else might come along and not see him in time to stop.”

She types a few keys on the keyboard of the computer in front of her, nodding and humming her understanding as she eyes the screen.

“Well, it might not have been the safest way to go about it, but you’re fine and he didn’t bite you, so I guess all’s well that ends well, huh?”

Her smile, for a moment, is contagious. He grins bashfully down at his hand on the counter—the flesh one, pallid and still slick with rainwater with small, wiry black dog hairs stuck under his sleeve. 

“I would be interested in adopting him if no one claims him. He’s a very good dog.”

She bites her lip, still smiling. When she doesn’t think that he’s paying attention, she steals a few small glances at him, her cheeks blotching with subtle color before she continues typing in whatever information she needs.

“That’s very kind of you. There are so many strays in this county alone, and we’re only seeing more every day. These rural areas are the worst, really. And big, black dogs like that aren’t easy to adopt out. People dump them and think that they’ll just be okay living in the wild, but a dog isn’t capable of just surviving on nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if that poor boy was shot by some farmer who caught him trying to get to his chickens. His fur seemed so matted that we might have to shave him just to operate.”

Shiro nods again, leaning his weight more heavily against the counter. He feels so tired now that he could potentially curl up on one of those padded benches against the wall and doze off. He feels so strung out that even the additional knowledge that they might actually have to operate on Keith barely even phases him.

On the inside of his black eyelids, he can only envision the petrified face of that dead cow. The open mouth and the bloated tongue, and the eyeballs bulged out and half-eaten by maggots. His stomach turns at the thought of it, at all of that blood, at the sparkling glass hanging in the air like a halo around the pulverized front end of his steaming car and that slick, red-stained face watching him, unmoving—

“Sir? Sir, are you okay?”

He snaps back to attention, standing taller where he’s slouched against the counter and blinking in quick succession to clear his thoughts. The vet stands in front of him, one hand extended and ghosting just above his fist, shaking and cold and so tightly wrapped around itself that he can feel his fingernails scoring crescents into his palm. 

He gasps deeply, shaking his head. He pulls away and lifts his arm, wiping the sweat and rain-water from his brow.

“Y-yes, sorry,” he says. “It’s… it’s been a long day. I guess seeing that poor dog like that was harder on me than I thought.”

She nods again, sucking in one side of her cheek.

“I understand,” she tells him. “The first animal that I saw like that… it bothered me for a long time. You get used to it in this line of work eventually, of course, but… that first dog always stands out in my memory. Everyone always says that working with animals must be so fun, but you see a lot of stuff like that. And it gets easier, but it’s never really  _ easy _ .”

He combs his fingers through his hair, breathing out a shaky hum that he hopes sounds like confirmation. He eyes the murky black puddles that he trailed in from outside, feeling suddenly terrible that surely this vet will have to clean up after him once he’s gone. And he doesn’t think on it too hard, only stops for a single second before he turns to resume the final steps of check-out to ponder it, but…

The blood on the floor…

Shouldn’t it be redder? 

Should it look so much like tar, or watered ink, or… nothingness?

He shakes his head.

“Can I leave my number for you?” He asks. “So you can tell me when he’s feeling better, and… if I can come to pick him up?”

Her smile returns. She types a few more lines, and soon after, she asks for his information.

She locks the doors after he wishes her goodnight and steps outside. He pats around in his pockets and finds a crumpled and damp box of cigarettes, tugging one from inside and lifting it to his lips. It’s bent awkwardly in half, and his lighter refuses to ignite the tip for three entire turns of the flint, but eventually, he inhales a deep breath of smoke. He revels in the feeling of it tingling and burning down his throat.

He watches the rain dripping over the overhanging ledge of the roof. He watches as the lights behind him flicker and turn down.

He watches the slow drag of bright headlights in the street as a few straggling vehicles traverse this road, heading home for the night, he presumes. This entire town has an early curfew, and right now, he feels like he might be the only human left alive out here.

He drops his cigarette into a puddle, half-smoked, just over the edge of the sidewalk, dipping down to the asphalt of the parking lot.

His footsteps splash in shallow puddles. The light remnants of the previous rainfall patter against his shoulders and drizzle through his hair, chilling his scalp, dripping slowly into his eyes, over the divot of his upper lip, tracking down to drop from the point of his chin onto the black-stained fabric of his ruined coat.

He closes the back door of his car. The light inside finally dies away. The beeping of the alarm fades to all-encompassing silence.

And he’s left in the darkness and the quiet, and the light drizzle of the rain. He rounds his car and slides himself inside, and he can’t stop himself, as he drives himself in the direction of home, from peering into the backseat every so often as though he might catch sight of those upturned, pointed ears.

He doesn’t return home until nearly 3 AM.

He falls asleep on his living room couch, too tired to do more than kick off his boots and shed his dirtied coat and jeans on the hardwood floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There once was a boy whose mother was a murder of crows.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to [Mai](https://twitter.com/paladongs) for updating this chapter for me!

Pop.

Pop.

Creak. Sizzle.

Whimper.

Pop. Sizzle. Creak.

Groaning, fizzling. Creaking. Popping.

Dogs whimpering and crying. Bones shoved from jagged, unnatural positions and righted. Dislocated loudly and violently into place.

Drip.

Sizzle. Groan.

Claws clicking on tile floor. Dogs crying in surrounding cages. The sizzling of his skin melting, his bones crunching inward, his hips realigned like a doll’s limbs pulled from their sockets and shoved forcefully back. Black blood and rotten flesh sliding down, swirling a drain in the center of the cage and disappearing into the depths of it.

The dark silhouette of canine heads watching him, their beady eyes catching the moonlight through the windows overhead, sparkling on fear-bared teeth and raised haunches and names written in loopy hand on little tags hung from the front of each of their pens. They growl and they cry and they make feeble, quiet noises. They gnash their teeth against the bars of their cages and scratch at them with their paws. 

And he offers them nothing but a single, silent look as the wiry hair matted around his eyes fizzles and liquifies and rolls gradually down his disintegrating body and all of him, in time, melts away.

Left behind, in the puddle of solid, thick black, is a single cockroach that scurries hurriedly through the narrow gap in a vent at the far side of the, now empty, cage.

* * *

Shiro sits in the driver’s seat of a stalled car.

He runs his fingers over the faux-leather upholstery of the steering wheel, listening to the static hissing from the radio and paying little mind to the glitching, flickering images blipping by on the screen of his dashboard GPS. The air conditioning blows softly from the vents, but he feels nothing as he waits. As he sits here quietly and feels as though any moment now, he’ll be given the proper go-ahead to start the car and keep moving, but he isn’t even sure what’s stopping him. He doesn’t know if he’s simply waiting for a passenger to crawl out of the black trees surrounding the rain-slicked road and open the other door, or if he’s running out the clock before something else reveals itself to him.

But he waits, and he leans back more comfortably in his seat, and he watches the rainfall dropping heavily in front of the bright high beams, spilling light onto the inky street in front of him. He taps his fingers against the steering wheel, leaning in. He squints through the rain and the overexposure of the headlights and he swears that he sees a dark mountain of something dropped directly in the path that he could take to leave here.

It’s a black blob of darker night, slick and soaked and bleeding out a long trail of inkiness that grows thinner and more diluted in the puddles of rain. He studies it for a long moment, biting his lip and holding his breath and reaching forward to turn down the knobs of his radio despite the fact that it does nothing to quiet the static noise. The black mass some yards away doesn’t move, aside from its wiry, matted hair nudging down each time that a droplet of rain plops onto it. Its wide ribcage doesn’t expand with labored breathing. Its mighty paws stay still and motionless and it simply lies there, collecting rain.

This scene is familiar in a way that he can’t quite put his finger on. He’s lived this before, maybe in another dream. Maybe in his imagination at some point so long ago that he could never hope to recapture it.

He doesn’t think about his actions as he unbuckles his seatbelt and gropes blindly in the dark for the handle of the door. He doesn’t consider the cold rain or the danger here, stepping out of his stalled vehicle in the center of a darkened highway as he slips a single foot from the car and plants it firmly on the wet asphalt. 

He slides himself out of the car, dithering for a short moment before he winds around the open door and leaves it hanging open. The door alarm dings incessantly, but he ignores it. He finds himself thinking that he might need to keep it open if he’ll have to jump inside fast and run away, but he doesn’t know where that thought comes from. He can’t, for the life of him, understand why the unmovable walls of black trees around him suddenly feel as though they’re alive and breathing, watching him with a billion tiny black eyes that he’d never have the time or patience to actually make out.

There’s something alive about the world around him that he’s never experienced before. Something akin to the feeling of melting in the vast belly of a massive creature that’s swallowed him up. The trees are veins and writhing innards and the road that he travels is deeper and deeper into the throat. He’s a helpless, feeble thing in the presence of this gigantic beast, and he isn’t even smart enough to struggle. Isn’t keen enough to plot his escape or feel any fear beyond a vague sense of discomfort, or do anything but continue to plod deeper and deeper into this danger until soon enough, maybe, it might be too late to escape.

But he steps forward, and his boots crunch against the dirt and rock and stray branches splayed wetly on the road. He stumbles as his foot catches something, and when he steadies himself and peers downward, he’s curious to find that there’s a path set out in front of him. A winding trail of little white paper squares all organized neatly ahead. He takes another step forward, avoiding the corners of the papers and doing his best to skirt between them. He feels a strange desire to flip them and he isn’t certain why. He wants to see if there’s anything written on their downturned faces. He wants to see if maybe this great creature around him has attempted to communicate through these curious square-shaped notes. He resists the urge for a while. He continues his trek forward and feels that he’s making no progress. When he turns around, he’s barely a few feet away from his car, despite the feeling that he’s been walking for hours. Despite the exhaustion that’s aching in the center of his shoulders and crawling up his calves with humming, sharp fingers.

He’s walking and walking but staying riveted in just one place.

He shakes his head, sparing a look in the direction of the black, wild-haired and unmoving mass still some yards away.

He stoops down and grasps one of the paper squares by the corner and lifts it to his eyes to see what’s waiting for him on the other side.

It’s a photograph, he realizes, once he turns it over. A polaroid of an overexposed cow corpse, disconnected between the neck and the jaw. He watches as the fuzzy edges jitter and hum, as the image shifts and the lighting warps, as the cow’s big, black eyes swivel around to stare up at him. Its fat, purple tongue slides back between its teeth and the maggots collected at the bloodstained fringes of its neck scurry about in pre-plotted paths. It watches him with a moon-eyed expression, revulsion and shock and a horrible sense of blame that that scatters just under his skin in the form of a new wave of shivering, clammy cold.

He drops the photo a moment later, watching with bated breath as it flutters back to the ground and settles face down, once again, onto the damp pavement. He can’t remember the exact spot that he picked it up from, but its movements are jerky and unnatural, just “off” enough that it appears to be a reverse stop-motion animation, like a movie rewound back to a scene that unfolded just moments before. He feels sick to his stomach. He feels new dread pooling in the depths of his belly.

The black figure still hasn’t moved even a centimeter. The massive paws extend out onto the dark pavement. The wiry hair mats down and bounces upward as thick raindrops continue to patter against it.

There are photographs all around him, white speckles glowing in the dark shadows of the night. They all point him in the direction of the unmoving black mass. They direct him there, like guiding lights. Like the lit fixtures at the edges of movie theater carpets, showing him the way to his seat.

He takes another step forward, wiping his damp hand on his coat and jolting when he feels the crust of dried blood branded on the fabric. He glances down at himself, perturbed as he takes in the soiled state of his attire and wondering if it’s even worth it to try to wash the mess away. The stain is solid black and devoid of any light, void-like, if he thinks about it, as though it’s solely responsible for sucking away any hint of light from this desaturated world sans the photographs illuminating his way.

It’s a deep cavern of shadow, as though he might be able to reach into his own belly and find a cavity carved out there. But he avoids that, feels sicker at the mere prospect of it, and continues on his path towards the silent black mountain of a roadblock ahead of him that seems to only be growing further and further away as he draws nearer.

But he does, eventually, get closer. And he notices that a few of the lit polaroids have been turned face-up. He bites his lip and holds his breath firmly in his throat as he tip-toes around them, as he risks a quick look down at one and notes with growing horror and agony pinched inside of him that he recognizes the pulverized car that stares up at him between the white paper frame. He recognizes the slick and shiny exterior of the body bag in another. He knows the blood on the road and the pieces of shredded tire and splintered metal. He gulps down the painful cry reverberating inside of him and blinks back the wetness rising to the corners of his eyes.

He ignores the final photo completely, tells himself that the fuzzy outline of a person waving to him through the glossy paper isn’t anyone who he knows or remembers, and that his glasses aren’t smashed and shattered, that his face isn’t bloody and flattened to the point that his skin is nothing but glass-speckled paste.

He’s shaking hard as he trudges forward. He feels so sick to his stomach that he’s doubled inward, stumbling through the final five steps before he reaches the black figure lying motionless in the center of the road.

The rain overhead, he notices, has stilled. The droplets are frozen in the middle of the air, glassy and solid when he reaches out and touches one. He shoves them away as he moves forward, shakes his head and forces himself to take measured, deep breaths. He hesitates for a moment as he watches the pile of darkness in front of him. It doesn’t breathe. It doesn’t roll over. It gives no indication that it’s even alive anymore, and it gives him no reason to believe that it could truly be the thing that the photographs and the rain and his mysteriously dead car in the middle of the highway might have been intending to lead him to.

Silence pervades for a long moment. Until, finally, he drops down to his knees, extending a hand to ghost just inches above the coiled black fur of the animal that still lays, motionless, in front of him.

The blood pooling from it runs in twin trails that coast around his body, avoiding him completely. They disappear into the shadowed night behind him when he looks back, slithering like snakes from the wooly fur of the animal like a perpetual loop that doesn’t stop no matter how many endless minutes he simply slouches here on the asphalt and lingers with his fingers just inches above the dog’s fur.

He watches without thought or emotion, frozen in place as the massive rib cage suddenly expands, slowly, in the first of many breaths. As the paws twitch and the bushy tail thumps and the ears swivel around to point in his direction. The dog’s black eyes slide open moments later, its jowls spreading apart and revealing many rows of straight, spaded teeth. And it leans upward then, its skin warping and sliding away and pooling in a coiled pile at Shiro’s knees. 

And underneath, as the skin falls away, Shiro meets the eyes of something else.

A… person, he realizes. A boy. A naked man turned away and staring off into the black night, so pale that his bare skin seems to emit its own light, seems to glow like the moon suspended high above them in the sky and obscured by the clouds. The angular slope of his sharp chin leads down into a narrow, fine neck. His wide shoulders are rounded and smattered with dim, long-faded scars. His arms are soft and thin but wired with dense muscle that flexes as he clasps his hands in his lap. The notches of his spine shift under his pearly flesh. He tips his head up and exposes his throat to the dark street and the surrounding trees and the still-frozen glass raindrops hanging all around them.

He’s beautiful, Shiro thinks. Like an angel wrapped in dog-skin. Like a flower growing gracefully in the wake of a forest fire that caked the ground in ash.

His hair is matted and soaked from the rain. It’s tangled and black like oil shimmering in the night. It hangs over into his dark eyes, his lashes thick and stuck together wetly, his eyes wide and big and lively like fire licking behind frosted glass.

He turns those eyes to Shiro, who jumps, but he doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t run, feels suddenly rooted under the weight of that stare, pinned under the attention granted to him by the most ethereal creature that he’s ever laid eyes on. The most miraculous fallen star that he’s ever been allowed to revolve around.

The boy watches him for a long moment, his thick brows dropped low, his lips pursed tightly, his jaw tight.

And then he reaches forward, his fingers mere centimeters away from Shiro’s, and he says quietly, flatly, “I’ll be there soon.”

Shiro jolts awake. 

He feels his belly drop as he’s falling, rag-dolled and helpless to do much of anything but grasp at the closest thing to him—a throw pillow that’s still warm from his body lying over it moments ago—but it does little to break his fall. He crashes to the floor, disoriented as a sharp ache splinters out where his back meets the hardwood, the air knocked out of him temporarily as he gasps and jolts and inevitably laxes once he realizes, finally, where he is.

Right, yeah. Okay, he remembers now. He got home late last night. He didn’t feel like showering or washing up and he knew that his filthy couch wouldn’t suffer much from a few extra stains if he were to toss and turn and track the blood from his clothing into the fibers. His shoulder feels rubbed raw when he reaches his flesh hand up to massage the indentations left under his shirt collar by the straps of his prosthetic. He already regrets being such an idiot last night, when he thinks about the fact that now he’ll only be graced with a few short hours without it on before he’s forced to shower and dress and drive back into town for those interviews that Allura set up for him with the police officers. 

He considers, momentarily, calling her and canceling. Or even just asking if she can reschedule it. He decides against it moments later, already feeling guilty that he’s forced her to put her neck out for him once again and give him a task that he’s already having trouble doing properly.

He scrubs his hand over his face, grimacing at the greasy night-old sweat and dirty, dried rainwater slicked there. He pulls back his hand and inspects the smudge of black streaked over it, too lazy to lean forward and figure out which part of his shirt might be covered in it, but dropping his head to the side and inspecting his discarded coat and pants instead.

The boots, some ways away, are caked with mud and still look damp. The coat is a lighter black shade now, ashen and not nearly as void-like and light-devouring as it had looked to be last night. He feels a little bit guilty for ruining a gift that Lance went through the trouble of buying him the first time that he’s worn it, but he knows that Lance would understand if he were to explain it to him. He knows that, of anyone that he’s met, Lance has the softest spot for animals. He wouldn’t have the heart to reprimand Shiro for sullying an article of clothing that he’d bought if he knew that he only did so in order to save some innocent dog’s life.

And thinking of that dog, of poor Keith surely sleeping off surgery and doped out on so much doggy pain medication that he might not even remember his new name, it makes Shiro contemplate calling the vets himself and asking if there’s any early morning news. But when he rolls to his side and angles himself so he can grab his half-dead and dirt-caked phone from his coat pocket, he realizes that seven in the morning is perhaps just a little bit _ too _ early to be harassing those poor girls, who probably stayed at work late last night just to help him and Keith out.

They said that they’d call him if they had any updates, he knows this. They said that they’d let him know as soon as they were certain that Keith was his to keep. And he has to trust that they won’t be willing to shove him off into a pound in lieu of adopting him out to a loving, welcoming home. He has to have faith in them that they’ll keep him in the loop in the event that there’s ever any news.

So he’s left here, aching and splayed lazily on the floor, wondering if it’s even worth it to go back to sleep as he flips through his text messages and learns that Allura has scheduled his interviews at noon. Or if maybe he should resign himself to a tired day of suffering and get up, shower, make breakfast, and work on some of his other articles before he’s required to collect more data for the bigger project.

But when he thinks about breakfast—he curses loudly, shoving up from the floor—he realizes that he never brought his groceries inside last night. And while evenings in autumn might be cold… he isn’t sure if he should trust that gallon of milk for his coffee or not.

Just his luck, he thinks. Just his luck that for once he’d remember to actually buy a new gallon and he’d forget the stupid thing in the car.

For all he knows, it might be exploded and already curdling into cheese in his trunk. He dreads even checking for it, but he knows that the sooner he does, the sooner he can eat breakfast and proceed to ignore the problem until inevitably the smell either fades away or doesn’t bother him anymore.

He plants a hand against his couch to help steady him as he pulls himself to his feet. He rests his palms against his hips and arches his back, enjoying the few pops of his spine as it re-aligns itself. The lumpy living room couch has never been a very good bed, he knows. He’s fallen asleep on it many times in the middle of self-editing his articles too close to the deadline, or drinking himself into oblivion, or reading a particularly good book. He wouldn’t be surprised to discover that his spine has been permanently pretzeled from the unnatural contortion of his body when he squeezes himself onto the cushions. He wouldn’t be even remotely shocked to discover that he’s done some real damage to his bones and muscles from all of the times that he’s jumped awake and fallen from it onto the floor.

Maybe he’ll call that chiropractor that Lance referred him to one of these days. Or maybe he’ll just ignore it until he forgets that it’s an issue.

He lopes over to the door, rubbing tiredly at the corners of his eyes and wondering if he still has any of that cinnamon-bun flavored coffee creamer powder left that Lance gifted him last Christmas, upon returning from a business trip to some small town that boasted… _ something _. He can’t keep all of Lance’s gimmicky article topics straight anymore, especially while he’s nursing a sore back and a pervasive headache and carrying every pound of his pent-up exhaustion so heavily on his shoulders.

He grasps the knob of his front door, tugging it open and taking a few tentative steps outside, but stumbling, suddenly, as his socked foot catches on something heavy in front of him and his hand, still wrapped around the doorknob, is the only thing that steadies him enough to stop him from tumbling forward and face-planting on the rickety, termite-eaten porch.

He jerks his chin downward, belligerent for a flash of a moment as his primal brain, the one charged only by his sensations and animalistic wants and needs, urges him to kick whatever he nearly tripped on so hard that it learns to stop being in his way. But he stops himself just as quickly as he thinks it, reeling back far enough that he back-steps beyond the threshold of the door, taken aback and mortified and thoroughly confused when he realizes that…

It’s his grocery bags. Three of them lined up neatly side-by-side, and the center one pinned with one of the sticky notes that he recognizes from his office—the silly blue cloud-shaped ones that Allura bought for him in an office gift set for his birthday. The cover of the note is scribbled in thin, sloppy letters, embedded so deeply with ink that he can see the bubbles of the words bled through to the other side when the breeze turns up of corners. In few words, the note reads:

_ MILK IN FRIDGE. _

_ THANKS. _

He stares at it for a moment, telling himself desperately that Lance is probably back in town. He has a key. He could have brought the milk inside last night. But that isn’t Lance’s handwriting, and there’s no good reason why Lance would go through the trouble of bringing the milk in but leaving everything else outside. It isn’t likely that he would have left before Shiro woke up, or even decided against shaking him awake and reminding him to take a shower and remove his prosthetic while he slept in order to avoid the painful chafing of the straps against his skin.

He scratches the back of his head, leaning out over the porch once again and craning his head back and forth to study the woods surrounding his yard. Nothing seems particularly out of place. His car is parked a little crooked in the driveway, but he remembers pulling over recklessly last night in his exhaustion. He remembers thinking that he’d probably messed up some of the grass and imprinted the soft, rain-dampened ground with tire marks, or crushed some of the beer cars further into the soil.

Even the trunk is closed. The car itself is still and innocuous and the morning is chilly but peaceful, serene. Even the usual birdsong sounds quieter when he remembers to listen for it.

He doesn’t feel the looming sense that the trees are alive around him, as he had in his dream. He doesn’t feel as though anything is particularly abnormal about the scene in front of him, which only manages to drive him further into his theory that Lance or Allura or someone else close to him must have just hurriedly attempted to do him a favor but hadn’t had the time or patience to rifle through his cabinets in order to put everything in the correct place.

After a moment, he leans forward and scoops two of the bags into his arms. He pivots back and sets them just inside the doorway, grasping the third by the edge before cradling it to his chest, and pausing to give his yard a final once-over before he shakes his head and steps back inside, closing the door and latching the lock behind him.

His bread is somewhat crushed and his jar of peanut butter is scratched up when he pulls each thing out and sets them on the counter. He’s short a cheese can, which he wonders if he might find tucked in a hidden corner of his trunk if he cared enough to go outside and search for it. One of the beers from his six-pack has been torn from its plastic ring. It’s gone, too, unaccounted for. He wonders if Lance might have taken it as payment, if later on he’ll send Shiro a text and apologize for not staying longer, and explain to him that he left the other groceries on the porch to catch Shiro’s attention so he wouldn’t trek all the way out to his car only to find that its contents had disappeared.

He doesn’t mind the stolen things, frankly, and he feels as though at the very least, Lance got some semblance of payment for how often he’s shoving aside his own wants and needs in order to accommodate someone who isn’t even capable of returning the favor. And he tells himself that he’ll offer the rest of the six-pack to Lance when he visits later today, as a show of his gratitude and his absence of hard feelings, and if maybe he can explain to Lance that he wasn’t, for once, passed out in a drunken stupor but instead spent his evening on more charitable endeavors.

Lance will be happy to hear that, and he’d be lying if he denied that he isn’t just a little bit excited to let him know. It’s been so many years since he’s done anything even remotely positive with his life, and maybe this stray dog situation is a good thing. Maybe it’s the catalyst for change that he’s been waiting for ever since he bought this cabin and situated himself far enough away from civilization so he could supernova in peace.

He eats bread spread with peanut butter for breakfast. He decides to wait on coffee until after he showers and brushes his teeth. He tucks the alcohol bottles and six-packs into his fridge, setting the peanut butter and bread in the cabinet and pouring himself a glass of water from the tap to wash down his meal once he’s finished.

He showers soon after, washing away the muddy black from his skin and brushing his teeth, collecting all of his dirty clothes from the bathroom once he’s done. There’s just the smallest amount of detergent left in the laundry room, and he empties it liberally over the pile of clothes that he shoves into the washing machine. He tells himself that he’ll hang his clothes to dry until he can find the right kind of tubing to fix the dryer. He feels strangely weightless today, weirdly excited to find himself back in town and to get a move on with this case. To tackle today’s to-do list until he hears from the girls at the animal hospital again, and he can hopefully manage to clean up his home appropriately enough to welcome Keith to live in it.

It’s a nice enough dream, he thinks. He dresses himself in the last clean pair of pajamas left in his dresser and treks back to the kitchen to make himself some coffee before he works on a few quick _ Ask Andrea _ articles that he’s capable of banging out before he needs to get ready to head back to town.

When he returns to the living room with his coffee, he realizes where he went wrong with his planning. He’d thought earlier that he’d curl up comfortably on his couch, but… it’s streaked with filth now, possibly unable to ever be cleaned properly, possibly damaged for good.

He can imagine, when he looks at it, eternally rising from it and finding a layer of dusty black rubbed in the fibers of his pants. He might be able to put a blanket down on it, but he doesn’t have one that he’d be okay with ruining too. Maybe he’ll talk to the lady who writes homemaking articles for the paper about DIY couch cleaning supplies, or anything that he might be able to do in lieu of burning it. It’s an old thing that he got secondhand at a yard sale. The sellers had offered their truck to move it when they’d noticed the limited space in his car. It holds little sentimental value, aside from the fact that he just prefers not to get rid of most things. That he clings to anything that he’s ever managed to own until it’s so incapable of functioning correctly that Lance holds a mini intervention and finally convinces him to buy something to replace it.

He bites his lip, setting down his mug on the small side table next to the couch and padding forward to toss some of the throw pillows and blankets from the chair across from it. He grabs his laptop from where he usually stows it under the couch as well, setting it on the arm of the chair and moving the mug from one side table, by the couch, to the other, by the chair. 

It takes a few moments to organize himself and to feel comfortable, and he silently curses “last night” Shiro as the sole reason why all of his writing today will surely feel “off”, since he’s grown to be such a creature of habit and he always works on the _ Andrea _columns on the couch. He does the horoscopes in his office-shed, pretends that one of these days he’ll ever uncap the heavy telescope stored there, brush the layers of dust off of it, and gaze up at the stars for inspiration. But he tells himself today that he’ll answer some of these questions from the chair. That it might spark some creativity if he’s to break the mold and write under different circumstances. 

Lance takes his notes on the road, usually, in the backseat of taxis or during red-eye flights home. There’s no reason why Shiro can’t unearth some semblance of creativity three feet away from the place where he regularly types these messages out.

So he sighs, and he waits for his computer to boot up and watches the trees blowing in the breeze just outside of the window across the room. He watches the grass flattening in the wind and that stupid too-high bird feeder swaying and tumbling about. And he realizes, as he continues staring, that there aren’t any birds fretting over it.

There aren’t squirrels or rabbits traipsing around in the grass. There aren’t foxes or snakes or… _ anything _. It’s still outside, like a ghost town of a front yard. It’s motionless sans the breeze rustling through the flora and the clambering bird feeder high up in that old oak tree.

He contemplates this for a long moment and wonders if that’s abnormal for this time of day, can’t remember even as he tugs his gaze away to type in his log-in info how long it’s been since he’s been awake so early in the morning without anything to do.

But he shakes his head inevitably, and he chalks up all of these foreboding feelings to nothing but symptoms of the weird dream that he had this morning, that’s barely tangible in his thoughts anymore. He excuses it as tiredness, as residual creeps clinging to his thoughts after finding himself so desperately tossed between his emotions last night. It’s been a long time since he’s allowed himself to think about that car wreck or that neighbor’s dog, or the group homes and foster care and every disappointing thing in his life that crafted him into such a disappointing person. It’s been so long since the memories have been impossible to abate that he wonders if he should call his therapist and schedule an early skype call.

The first message in the _ Ask Andrea _ file that Allura forwarded to him is about weddings. 

Shiro is sent back, for a moment, to a conversation that he took part in years ago—a brief moment of time in which the roof tiles grated against his palms and the thick summer air wrapped around him, mosquitos nibbled at his exposed wrists and throat as his head tipped back and admired the stars, but he didn’t care.

The hand in his felt warm and solid, tethering him to a snapshot in time that he’d never wanted to end.

_ “Let’s have one of those hideous, overdone weddings, okay? We’ll make the reception so horrible that everyone will suspect that we did it on purpose.” _

A laugh, a tightening of fingers curled around his own.

_ “We _ would _ be doing it on purpose then, wouldn’t we?” _

_ “Of course. But it’s not like any of our guests have to know that for sure.” _

He shakes his head, chasing away the ache that lurches in his chest.

He clears his throat and rubs a hand at his temple, scrolling through the entirety of the email to check its length before he concentrates and reads. He vacates his thoughts and pretends, for a moment, that he has no memories related to this topic. That, for the sake of trudging through this as Andrea herself would, he is a blank slate of a person who carries no personal biases about relationships or marriage or any long-term commitments to another organic, slow-dying being.

The question reads as follows:

_ Dear Andrea, _

_ I am a thirty-two-year-old woman getting married for the first time to a man who, just a few years ago, ended his first marriage. I’ve always dreamed of having one of those grandiose, superstar weddings, the kind of thing that people talk about for months after. It’s been my dream since I was a little girl, to feel like a princess on this special day, and I always hoped that my husband-to-be would share this sentiment and agree that spending the extra money on a blowout reception was a necessity. So, obviously it was important to me and our soon-to-be marriage. However, my fiance seems to believe that he’s already done the big wedding and that the financial strain played a big part in ruining his last marriage, so he refuses to even entertain the idea that we’ll spend more than $10,000 on a wedding. This just doesn’t line up with the plans that I’ve had since childhood, but no matter how many times I attempt to reason with him, he continues to assert that we shouldn’t dip into our savings and take out a few small loans just to make my dream come true. _

_ As you’d expect, this has added a large amount of tension to our relationship, to the point where I’m wondering if it will even be a good idea to marry someone who so clearly doesn’t respect what I want. _

_ Should I drop it? Should he be more understanding of my desires? Should we meet somewhere in the middle? _

_ I’d love to hear from someone who doesn’t think that I’m just being materialistic, someone who understands that what I want shouldn’t be shoved aside just because it isn’t “realistic”. _

_ Hope you can help shed some light on the situation, _

_ Nervous and Unsure _

  


He sucks in the side of his cheek. He opens a word document and hovers his fingers above the keys. 

His first draft is scrapped immediately, the natural flow of his fingers typing something akin to: “You’re a stupid, frivolous person and you should be ashamed of yourself for making this an issue when people are dying violent, terrible deaths in Godless wars all over the planet.”

So he dials it back. He swallows the initial urge to be nothing short of a petty internet troll and tries to imagine what Andrea, miraculous super mom of four and housewife of the year might say.

She’d be sympathetic. She’d be realistic. 

He tries again. 

_ Dear Nervous, _

_ As you may or may not have heard, many romantics in the past have likened marriage to a house. These romantics will go on to say that if a lightbulb or a fire alarm is broken, you don’t get rid of the entire house, but you change the bulb or the batteries, and you strengthen the internals of that marriage. It isn’t too far off from the truth, really. It isn’t unreasonable to tell someone to work first on the small things that they can address in their house before questioning whether or not the house was built on a broken foundation. _

_ I’d like for you to imagine your dream home. For me, I would love to find myself in a quaint cabin in the middle of remote wooded acres, all to myself, my husband, and my children. I would like a shed, perhaps, that could be converted into a home office or playroom. Maybe a balcony on the top floor from which I could watch the kiddos playing in the yard. And a fire pit out back that we could all gather around and roast hotdogs and marshmallows. If my husband were to explain his dream home to me, perhaps he’d be more interested in a flashy high-rise apartment in the heart of a bustling city. Maybe he’d be more inclined to agree with me that privacy and plenty of wooded land for the kids to run around in would be the best for our family unit. _

_ But if we were both stuck in our ways and we refused to meet in the middle, neither of us would be happy if one member of our party was miserable and the other got exactly what they wanted. Maybe we could settle on a house in the suburbs that was closer to the city, but also remote enough that we’d feel safe allowing the kids to play outside. Maybe we’d agree to settle down in the woods until the kids grew up and we could move to that city high-rise and enjoy our golden years there. _

_ When you’re laying the foundation of your new house, you have to understand that both parts of the marriage won’t always agree on everything. But in order to build a happy home that both of you are content in, compromise and working together cohesively is key. _

_ My advice for you, Nervous, is to meet your future husband halfway. Maybe you won’t get the $10,000+ wedding that you always dreamed of, but maybe your husband, you, and your bank accounts can all be more than happy settling with something nice and tasteful, but more affordable for both of you. _

_ Cheers, and congratulations on the wedding, _

_ Andrea _

It isn’t the most inspired response that he’s ever written, but he saves the file and promises himself that he’ll do more extensive edits later. In general, he’s found that it’s easier to do each step of the process piece by piece, starting first with the roughest draft of his responses then moving on to edit them one by one. That way, he’s learned from tired experience, he won’t have to go back and reread and fact check every time he starts something else. And it’s easier to write these without thinking too hard about them, to shove off the responsibility to be coherent and understanding and fair as readers have come to expect from Andrea onto a Shiro who exists at a later date.

A Shiro, hopefully, who can figure out how to get black ink stains out of his beloved couch cushions, because, as he’d feared, concentrating from even a slightly different angle of the room than he usually works from is proving to be detrimental to his concentration.

He works through the next question, something about a son who wets the bed, then onto another, about children asking for a dog for Christmas when Dad is allergic. That reminds Shiro, once again, of Keith, and he checks his phone for notifications. It’s nearly 10:30 AM now, and still, no calls or texts from anyone, not even the animal hospital. He scratches the raw skin of his shoulder, regretting the fact that he didn’t take it easier this morning and leave the prosthetic off for a while, but knowing that he would have regretted being lazy as well.

It’s nearly time to leave anyway, so he downs the rest of his room-temperature coffee and closes his laptop, setting it on the cushion of his seat as he eases up.

He pauses just before he crosses through the living room into the kitchen towards the staircase, alerted suddenly by the strange silence that’s only grown more pronounced the longer he’s sat alone working on his _ Andrea _ responses. His brows draw low, knitting close together as he turns his head and paces just a little bit closer to the window. His hands settle over the edges of it, his face drawing close to the dusty, rain-marked glass as he drags his eyes over the limited scope of his front yard.

The beer cans in the wet soil sparkle in the morning sun. The branches of the trees sway and the bird feeder bounces about, and the tall grass lays flat under the weight of the wind.

And far off, in the surrounding wall of woods, he’s started to find a dark shadow of an animal tucked between the thick trunks of the trees. A gnarled, wild rack of antlers spindle out like black veins against the canvas of green woods. The fur is inky, dark like a silhouette, like a shadow cast from a normal deer that maybe he can’t see.

But it’s undeniable, when he catches its eyes and it watches him. He can see the way that the sunlight filtering through the barren branches of the forest casts long stripes of gray over its slick fur. He can see that weighty, full rack of horns swaying gently, eased about in tiny micro-movements from the smallest tilts of its head. Shiro isn’t sure why it startles him so much to see it, to catch its gaze and why he feels, suddenly, as though it isn’t simply staring at something in the yard that he can’t make out, but actually gazing through the window to watch him.

His heart pounds swiftly in his chest. His palms sweat and he feels his skin crawling, as though a hundred tiny insects have burrowed beneath the surface of it.

Across the open living room into the kitchen, above the sink, there’s another window that looks out into the yard. From that window, there’s a sudden, hard thump. It rips his attention immediately from the deer. He jerks forward and scrambles over, but when he props himself with palms against the edge of the sink and rises to the tips of his toes to gaze out, he can see nothing but a smudge of dark dirt on the window and nothing else else moving beyond the glass.

He cranes his neck back in the direction in the woods where he saw the deer, but he’s curious to note that it’s gone. It’s faded away into the thick greenery as though it might have been nothing but a shadow after all, as though it might not have actually been there in the first place and his persistent paranoia might have simply willed it into existence for a fraction of a moment.

He shakes his head, dropping back from the sink and ghosting a hand over his throat. His entire body feels tense now. It feels harder, for a moment, to remember how to breathe.

A few seconds pass, and he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. It might be Lance, finally explaining why he stopped by so early this morning. It might be the ladies at the animal hospital telling him about Keith’s progress. It might be Allura, reminding him that he has interviews in town today.

Whatever it is, he knows that it means that he’s running out of time. He drags himself through the room and back up the stairs to collect a presentable and fairly-clean outfit from the dwindling selection on his floor. He skirts into the laundry room on his way back, tugging the clothes from the washing machine and hanging them on hangers from any loose rafter in the low ceiling or jutting nail in the wall that he can find.

And once he puts on his shoes and a fresh jacket, once he collects his files on the case and begins the trip back to his car, he pauses outside, just near the kitchen window, to study what might have crashed into it.

As he nears it, he notices the blob of black nestled in the overgrown grass. It’s a small, inky blotch among the green. It looks, at first, as though it might be another of those strange black stains that fill so many of the polaroids in his folder, but as he gets closer, the shape of it becomes clearer. The fibers in the wings and the messy feathers, the skinny legs with their curled talons sticking up and out into the air jaggedly. 

The beak shimmers in the early afternoon sun, deep black and cracked around the edges where the poor bird collided violently with his window. Its beady eyes stare blindly into the open sky above it in a way that reminds him all too painfully of the cow photos in the evidence folder, and his stomach turns. He falls back against the side of the house and drops the folder to the ground. It flutters open, the pages flap in the light breeze. 

The photos spill out, glossy and glittering and forbidden to look at as his mind gropes through the muddy dreams and memories and fears all curdled in his brain. He gasps in a few deep breaths. His fingernails scrape against the splintered log visage of the cabin.

He feels the small pieces of wood breaking off under his nails, feels them embedding sharply in the skin there, twinging and pulsing and ripping his attention, thankfully, away from the blurry image of a sleek, black body bag floating to the forefront of his murky thoughts.

His head falls back against the house with a thump. Above him, startlingly, he can hear the cooing and cawing of birds and the fluttering of wings overhead. 

He watches the black brush-strokes of their wings floating against the light of the sun, slashed across the blue sky like moving calligraphy marks animated in stop-motion.

They jerk about as their wings flutter. He breathes deeply, too hot in his coat in the warmth of the morning. Even the autumn chill does little to quell the heat scored inside of him, and gradually, he allows himself to slump down onto his backside on the ground.

A hand on his heart, he feels the jittering of his pulse dying down. He reminds himself that he’s okay and he’s safe and nothing can hurt him here, in front of his own home. There are only birds and deer here, only squirrels and rabbits and the rats living in his walls. 

It’s just him and the beetles and the earthworms in the soil, just the cool, damp grass and the open sky and the cage of trees obscuring the view of his cabin from the street some many acres away.

He sucks in air through his mouth, exhaling through his nose. He focuses on the circling birds overhead and feels like a dying animal being courted by vultures.

But he’s not dead, not in the physical sense. He’s alive and his blood is pulsing and he needs to pull himself up and get a move on it if he wants to make it to his interviews on time.

He tugs his phone from his pocket, heaving still as he checks the numbers on the screen. If there isn’t very much traffic, which he knows already that there won’t be, he should be able to make it to the diner with a few minutes to spare.

If he can make his legs work now and compartmentalize the rampant intrusive thoughts circling his brain like the crows circle him overhead, maybe he can actually manage to do his job today like a real, functional person.

He props his hand against the side of the house, feeling the grit of the splinters prickling in his palm as he hoists himself upward. His knees feel weak and jellied, his vision spinning and uneven for a moment as the vertigo and the roiling in his belly subside slowly.

He collects the contents of the folder next, careful not to allow his eyes to stray to the subjects of the photographs when he’s still so newly freed himself from another freakout. He clasps it tightly under his arm, brushing himself off with his prosthetic in a rubbery, clumsy way that barely manages to remove the twigs and dirt and stray grass from his pants.

He spares one final look at the dead bird some yards away, pausing for a long moment and staring at the empty hole in the grass where its limp and angular body laid just moments ago.

He can see the print of it still embedded in the ground. Easing closer, he can see the tiny droplets of black ink sizzling against the soil.

The bird, itself, is gone. No trace of it left aside from the black, inky acid that hisses in the soil. He suspects, with growing dread, that when he looks away again, even these small clues will be gone.

He scrubs a hand over his face, tearing himself away.

He didn’t sleep well last night.

He’s just seeing things now. 

This is all in his head.

* * *

“It didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary at first.”

Officer Thace is spreading jam on his toast. 

“We get calls all the time about coyotes attacking chickens and goats—the smaller stuff, you know? But every so often, we’ll get a complaint about a horse or cow mowed down by sick teenagers or the occasional neighbor with a grudge. It seemed altogether normal, the whole situation. Guy calls and says that one of his cows was murdered and he seems very upset about that. Which _ was _ weird, because this guy is a farmer. Obviously, he’s seen his fair share of guts and gore in his lifetime.”

Red spreads out over the bread. His knife digs into the tiny plastic container, scraping out the last slivers of jam trapped in the corners. It mingles on the bread with the melted butter. Small globs roll off of the surface and patter against the plate underneath it, but Thace pays it little mind.

He drops the knife on his rolled-out cutlery napkin, pressing his lips to the stickiness on his thumb for a short moment and lapping the jam there.

There’s a coffee stain dotted in black on the collar of his shirt. Shiro notices this, but he doesn’t include it in his written description. His pen scratches against his notebook. He glances up in intervals between writing to note a change in Thace’s expression, to catalog the drops in his voice and twitches in his demeanor. The clattering of cutlery around them and the laughter and voices of other patrons conversing with the waitstaff.

“So we arrive at the scene and another officer starts taking pictures of stuff—everything of interest. The guts and the corpse, but also the footprints and the scratches in the trees and all that. The usual. I’m sure you saw the photographs. It was bloody, especially bloody for this sort of thing. Animals, you know, they’re pretty tidy, usually. They’re not particularly looking for anything when they’re eating prey, but this cow was laid out the way that you’d see a suitcase after some businessman tears it open, trying to find his debit card inside of it. Its body was ransacked. And the autopsy—”

He reaches forward and take a sip of his coffee. On his plate, the butter and jam melt together into the soggy bread and the remaining puddles of yolks from his half-eaten eggs.

“If you told me a few decades ago that I’d be going to the police academy so I could sit in on a cow autopsy, I’d have laughed, but… I guess I’d just assume that I never got out of this godforsaken town.”

Shiro’s lips curl inward as he does his best to quell the smile rising to his face. His pen dithers for a moment over the closing quotation mark, before he tics it quickly and turns his eyes back up to meet Thace once again. 

He’s older than Shiro by a decade, give or take a few years. He’s a tired but handsome man, rugged in a way that ignites an embarrassing sort of heat under Shiro’s cheeks and in the deep pits of his belly, but friendly, too, Shiro knows. 

He’s been on the force longer than Shiro has even lived in this town, and long before Lance left for college and returned here to work. And he greets the townsfolk in a cordial, respectful and open way that tells of his ease here. He’s as authentic to the experience of this community as the semi-famous pies behind glass at the counter of this diner, or the newspaper that prints and sells copies in every area within 20 miles of here, or the pumpkin farms and orchards that provide produce to the adjoining communities for that comfortable, home-grown price.

Thace dots the corners of his mouth with his napkin. It’s dropped then, in a crumpled ball next to his plate. His hands lower to the table, framing the remainder of his meal and the soggy bread slathered in jam, just across from his glass of orange juice and half-empty mug of steaming, black coffee.

“The autopsy revealed that something had ripped out its heart. We thought Satanists, but obviously, we’re not wanting you guys to release that information. The safest story as of right now is some kind of wolf. That’s what we’re going with until we know for sure. There were dog sightings, it might be wounded. It might not have anything to do with the cattle deaths, but for now, we’re pinning it on an animal. No use in getting everyone all riled up just in case it turns out to be nothing.”

Shiro nods then, scribbling down “WOLF” in bold letters and underlining it for good measure. The ink smudges when he accidentally swipes his skin over the paper. He flips his hand over, studying the mess left from the ink on the paper, noting the black smudged there, thinking about Keith and the polaroids and the bird that disappeared from under his window this morning.

“What about the ink?” he asks then, twitching when Thace offers him a confused frown, shaking his head, clearing his throat and sitting straighter in his seat, “The… blood, or tar—that black fluid in all of the photographs? What do you make of that?”

Thace regards him carefully for a moment, his fingers looped around the handle of his coffee mug. He seems to be studying Shiro’s expression, weighing how likely it might be for him to include this information in his article, and so, Shiro pushes out a short breath and tells him, “For me, not the article. For my own curiosity.”

Thace lifts the mug to his lips and takes another drink. Longer this time, more drawn out and slow as he considers the words that Shiro is sure he’ll choose carefully. The mug taps as it meets the table again, and Thace pinches a slice of his soggy bread between his fingers.

“The lab tests said that it was blood,” he says, casually and blithely as though there’s nothing even remotely strange about the words leaving his mouth. “First, human. Then canine. Bovine, bird. There are a few different diseases that can cause black pigment in blood, but the tests for those all came back negative. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that even remotely implied that another animal flu could be sweeping through here or that the blood was more dangerous than any other blood.”

The limp toast hangs from his fingertips, the jam shimmering under the lights overhead and drizzling down over the surface of the melted butter, plopping into a mixture of egg yolks on his plate. He gazes through the window into the parking lot at a murder of crows rounding a small collection of french fries spilled on the asphalt. Shiro notes the small sprouts of gray and white peppering his sideburns and his beard, streaking through his hair in the sharp line at his temples and disappearing into jet black near his crown.

“I’d like to say that everything is fine. I’d love to tell you that there’s nothing to worry about and that surely, all of this will be over before it even becomes anything. But it’s difficult to say for sure. Without being superstitious, there’s no foundation for suspicion here. There’s no indication that it isn’t just a lot of animals going crazy and maiming each other. That it’s not just some group of individuals playing a very intricate prank. There’s no knowing for sure right now. But I can tell you one thing—”

Shiro watches the way that the yolks soak into the edges of Thace’s jam clots, like ink dispersed in water. Like those droplets of black this morning sizzling into the sun-dried soil.

“It’s not safe. Something is going on here, and my gut tells me that it’s dangerous.”


	4. Chapter 4

“You must understand that wolf sightings are not even remotely abnormal in a town like this one. You might consider me to be neglectful in my duties, but hearing about wildlife in a town that is secluded in the center of large stretches of nature is not particularly alarming.”

“I don’t consider you to be neglectful at all. You’re a police officer. Not animal control.”

Detective Ulaz’s lips curl up at the corners. He raises the to-go mug of a hot drink to his lips, his back flanked against his vehicle as Shiro dithers near the side of the road next to him. They watch the slow traffic looping around corners and stalling at the crosswalks and stoplights. Birds twitter overhead. The half-naked branches of surrounding trees sway in the gentle breeze.

The fingers of Shiro’s flesh hand feel frigid and he tucks them into his coat pocket. A cigarette clutched in his prosthetic burns gradually down to the filter, but he pays it little mind. Ulaz tells him that the hot tea at the bakery up the road is especially delicious, raising the mug in a faux-toast in front of his face. Shiro looks tired, he says. Maybe the caffeine will do him some good.

“I’ll be okay,” Shiro says. “I just appreciate that you’ve taken the time to be interviewed. I understand that it’s not easy, doing everything by the books, but still falling under suspicion.”

Ulaz chuffs a laugh, his small, dark eyes staring out in front of him into the street, to the black windows of the shops situated just across it. 

They’re standing side-by-side, neither facing the other. Neither pretending that this is anything but an uncomfortable and awkward business meeting in which Ulaz paints his side of the story and Shiro prepares a mental writeup of this information in his head, wording his claims and his explanations in a way that might make him sound more sympathetic to the average local reader.

It isn’t hard to make Ulaz sound likable, Shiro knows. He’s a polite man, straight-laced and reserved. There’s a gracefulness about him that’s hard not to find striking, a practiced ease and wideness to his strides and movements akin to an ice skater moving in seemingly slow motion around a rink. In a past life, maybe, Ulaz was an actor or a model or an athlete. Someone who Shiro would have never crossed paths with under normal circumstances. But it feels nice to meet him and to speak with him. There’s comfort found in his professional disposition. Something about him, or even everything about him, makes Shiro feel as though things might be okay, just because he’s near-impossible to rattle. Just because he’s so damn talented at keeping a straight face in the wake of a case this frustrating and discomforting.

Ulaz is right, anyway. There isn’t anything remotely strange about wolves in this area. The only difference, in this scenario, is that one of them is apparently dangerous, which only became clear to the police force after Ulaz fielded that call.

“Officer Thace has told me that his farmer reported shooting a dog, not a wolf. A wolfhound mix, to be precise, which could easily be mistaken for a wolf at its daunting size. I received another call last night, that someone had hit a large animal on the road. The caller also attested that it must have been a wolf as well. I responded to this one, of course, but by the time that we arrived on the scene, there was nothing left to collect. Just more black blood. Canine, this time, the labs informed us. Mr. Sal, a gentleman who owns a farm near Green Lion Creek, he’s the only civilian that we know of who owns a dog so large. But his, of course, was killed earlier in the month. We’re not entirely positive what to make of it.”

Something clicks momentarily in Shiro’s mind. He pauses, craning his head around to stare at Ulaz, who tilts his gaze up slowly to meet his. He isn’t smiling, isn’t particularly friendly or warm at a moment like this, but he’s a quiet and genuine man that Shiro knows only wants the best for this town. But Shiro isn’t thinking about Ulaz right now. He isn’t thinking about the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes or his downturned mouth, or the way that the sun sparkles on the product-shined expanse of his bald scalp.

He’s thinking about Keith, once more, intrusively—about the sheer mass of him and his dislocated hips and the blood that had been pouring out of him with no conceivable source.

Is it possible that…  _ Keith _ could be a key here? To this case, to this mystery? Could he have somehow have escaped from the people who were orchestrating all of this? Somehow, could he have created this mess all by himself?

The facts don’t add up just right, Shiro knows. There wasn’t dog blood at all of the scenes. There weren’t the right prints until after Sal’s pet died. But Keith was large enough to be a wolf, and he was injured. He’s horrified, for a moment, as he considers the fact that he might have carted Keith straight to the animal hospital, where they might have immediately called the police to report it. Maybe that’s why they haven’t contacted him yet. Maybe they’re just waiting until the right time to inform him that he accidentally solved the exact case that he’s supposed to be objectively writing about.

He straightens himself out, forcing his gaze to rest on the black tinted windows of the diner across the street. Clearing his throat as quietly as he can muster, he drops his cigarette to the ground, crushing it with his boot into the asphalt. 

“S-so… if you were to find this animal, the one responsible. This… wolf-dog. What would happen to it?”

Ulaz takes another long drink of his tea. He rests it against his chest, the fingers of his other hand drumming against the door of his car behind his back.

“Perhaps nothing,” he says. “Optimally, we’d want to send it to a shelter away from town. If it were to be adopted here, the farmers might have a vendetta against it. If it were to be proven domesticated and safe enough to exist as a pet, surely, eventually, it would become available for adoption. They’d warn that it wasn’t safe around other animals. They’d suggest that it go home with a family without kids. It would probably live a nice, comfortable life after that. We don’t punish animals for being hungry, after all.”

Another drink, Shiro likens the sound of his fingers against the car door to the pattering of rain on his windshield last night, imagines for a moment that he might gaze behind him and find Keith’s dark eyes still watching through the thick, twining bushes and barren tree branches over the hood of the police cruiser and the gravel lining the shoulder of the road.

“If it could be proven that it wasn’t safe for adoption, however, the dog would be destroyed. Euthanized humanely. But either way, the cattle would be safer after. We would all be allowed to move beyond this without worrying about where the creature might strike next.”

Shiro drags in a sharp breath, nodding belatedly and crossing his arms over his chest. His prosthetic, where the straps cling around his shoulder, rubs uncomfortably, and he feels eager once again to finish these meetings and go home for the afternoon where he can maybe rub some aloe lotion over the angry strap-burns and drink himself into oblivion until he forgets about the hurt.

“Have you received any calls about… finding the dog? Any corpses, or… live sightings?”

He feels like he’s inviting suspicion for even presenting that idea, but he isn’t sure why he feels that way. It’s up in the air whether or not an animal even orchestrated this crime, and it doesn’t seem as though it’s going to be held accountable for anything unless it’s not socialized enough to live with an adoptive family. He knows that unwittingly carting it to an animal hospital isn’t the sort of thing that will inevitably put him in prison, but…

He also knows that he isn’t particularly eager to divulge this information to Ulaz in the first place. And if it does turn out that his suspicions are true, he isn’t certain that he’ll ever clue anyone in as to where Keith, their perp, might be hiding in order to lick his wounds.

Ulaz takes another swig of his tea.

“As of right now, things are quiet. But we have no further leads.”   
A car pulls slowly down the road in front of them, obscuring Shiro’s view of the storefront window across the street for a short moment. Just as it pulls away, in the inky reflection of the low-hanging trees behind him, Shiro swears that he can see that dark deer from earlier, watching him from between the branches.

But when he wheels around, it’s gone. The trees are barren but the branches sway, as though caught in a light breeze that he can’t feel on his skin.

Ulaz watches him sideways over the rim of his to-go mug.

“You should go home and get some rest,” he says.

And maybe he’s right. Maybe this case just isn’t the sort of thing that he should be tackling when he isn’t even fully awake.

* * *

Sal’s farm is comprised of just the kind of landscape that Shiro feels as though he might have witnessed in the background of dairy commercials for decades, just before the logo fades into the center of the screen. It’s a vast expanse of rolling green hills and roomy pastures and happy, fat cows loping about and eating tall sprigs of grass as far as the eye can reach.

There are apple trees that have been picked almost clean, cornfields long-since harvested that sit empty and flat beyond the edges of the electric-lined fences.

There’s that big, red barn from the polaroids that Shiro can’t stop himself from accidentally staring at, and Sal, himself, in his stained overalls and thick flannel shirt. He’s a tall, round man with an unkempt beard and sharp eyes that watch Shiro down the bridge of his wide nose. 

The baseball cap protecting his short hair from the chill of this early autumn afternoon is faded and frayed. The logo on the front reads the name of the local high school baseball team, and Shiro wonders if he played for them in his youth, or if a child of his did once, who might have gone away to attend university far away from here on a sports scholarship.

This article doesn’t have a lot of room for fluff and character description, but maybe a followup will. Maybe he can ask Allura if he’ll be allowed a few random spreads throughout the winter months to write saccharine character profiles about everyone who was affected by these supposed wolf attacks.

He files that idea into the back of his thoughts for later use.

Sal, right now, is touring him about the farm, pausing every time that they reach a bald patch in the grass or a stray piece of yellow police tape to walk him through exactly why those things exist there.

“Friend of mine at the lumber yard says that fixing the broken boards on the barn won’t be too pricey,” he says. “But the board’s gonna look real shitty when it’s brand new and the other ones are faded. Like I’m not allowed to forget what that bastard did to my dog even after I jump through these expensive hoops to repair the damage.”

Shiro feels for him, but he wonders if perhaps he might have hesitated to shoot back then, had he known how much it would affect him emotionally now. 

He’s no stranger to a small, rural town’s love of hunting and firearms, and he knows that Sal had every right to protect his property from a rogue wild animal, but… He can’t help but wonder how it might have gotten past the electric fences that stand so tall around here that even an Olympic jumper would have trouble hurling over them. He wonders if Sal is suspicious about that too, and if he might just be waiting for someone else to suggest it so he doesn’t sound like a scorned man delving deeper into the throes of paranoia over the bad thing that happened to him.

“Did you bury the dog already?” Shiro asks, instead of any other pertinent questions that weigh heavily on his thoughts. “Or did the police take him in for an autopsy?”

Sal blows a long breath through his nostrils, shoving the chew in his mouth to the far side of his gums and leveling the old, red barn with another extended glare before he turns his attention back to Shiro. With his hands on his hips, the dark dirt stains near the pockets, the container of chewing tobacco rounded and bulged at his hip, Shiro can perfectly imagine him ambling out into the dark night at the first sign of trouble, perked by the howling and anguished cries of his beloved farm dog as he reaches for the shotgun that he keeps next to the front door.

He bites his lip, flicking his gaze to the distant cows, grazing on the grass.

Empathy, he reminds himself. These aren’t backwater hicks. These aren’t people undeserving of his respect.

Sal is still a man who was hurt by the very creature that he’s supposed to be investigating. He can’t completely disregard his feelings just because he disagrees with his use of a firearm against a defenseless, starving animal.

“He’s buried in the backyard behind the house,” Sal tells him, motioning vaguely in the direction of the modular home that sits atop a hill some ways up the field. “That dog’s been around since my kid started middle school. He’s in college now. It wasn’t a fun phone call, telling him that his childhood pet had been eaten by some sicko.”

They move further along the border of the fences, nearing the barn as Shiro curiously feels his pulse spike at the mere image of it. In the back of his thoughts, images writhe about and take indecipherable shape—the blood and the dead cows. The mutilated dog, the bullet holes. The wilted grass, the images of those things moving about like stop-motion films behind the glossy fronts of their photographs. That boy under the wolfskin, those beautiful, dark eyes.

_ “I’ll be there soon.” _

His breath catches firmly in his throat, caught around a lump lodged so hard in the center of it that he can’t swallow it down. He stumbles and feels the warmth of a hand reaching out to steady him, but he jerks away.

Not now, please, is the thought that swirls around his head like water orbiting a drain. But he can’t stop himself from seeing it: first, the dead dog in the overexposed photographs, then the dead man being dragged from the collapsed and molten steel of a wrecked car, catching fire on the sizzling pavement of the highway. The paramedics murmuring, the crowds collected thickly and impenetrable around him. The open, blue sky above, beamed down and clear and sunny as though this could have ever been considered a normal day.

The voices, far away and muffled in his ears. The feeling of pain so overwhelming creeping up his arm that he can barely stay conscious through it.

_ “—lost control of the wheel—” _

_ “—slammed directly into these men’s oncoming car—” _

_ “—massive pileup—” _

_ “—one survivor, the driver of the SUV—” _

Shiro feels the world around him growing murky and dark. He feels himself, for a moment, jerked forward against the sting of a belt fastened over him, his face thrust hard into the steering wheel of a car. He sees the glass floating in the air, hears the cries and the crinkling of the body bag.

There’s so much blood.

The man, next to him, his face is contorted and scarlet-painted. Shiro reaches out, fumbling to make contact but—

But…

Then, there’s only black.

He nods to and finds himself splayed out on the damp, dark asphalt of the highway. Ahead of him, in the dim light, he can see the reflective white lines dashed up the center and disappearing into the shadows. Underneath his elbow, there rests another polaroid, and he hesitates for a moment before he wrenches himself onto his side and slaps his rubbery hand down onto it, dragging it upward to his face. 

There’s nothing there but grass—dead brown circles of it beneath his kitchen window, where he’d found that crow this morning. He stares at it for a long moment, until the trees in the photo begin to sway and the grass presses down under the weight of the breeze, and he watches the black spots of tar twinkling in the morning light. He drops the photo to float face down, once again, onto the road.

He pushes himself up with his hands, his legs still spread over the road as he cranes his neck to make sense of his surroundings. His car is nowhere to be seen now, but he can hear the beeping of the “open door” alarm blaring somewhere in the distance of the inky night around him.

When he drags himself to his knees, his fingers slide in a warm, dark liquid that’s trailed further and further up the road. It starts heavy and thins, speckled further up where his vision blurs, and he ponders whether or not he should follow it.

He isn’t sure, but his body moves on its own. He’s on his feet, stumbling over the road, and following the dots of dark puddles endlessly, for what feels to be hours, until he spots the visage of a cloaked figure further up the road.

He knows how this ends. He knows that he’ll near the creature ahead of him and it’ll be that boy in the wolfskin. He understands this, but he feels no fear or dread. He feels anticipation, even at the mere prospect of catching sight of that boy’s beautiful face once again.

Each of his steps is stunted and clumsy. He nearly tumbles over each time that he moves. But each step also draws him closer to the wolf-skinned boy, and he feels his heart flutter in his chest, feels the excitement thrumming through him like electricity as he comes close enough to ghost his fingers over the wiry hairs of the wolf’s back.

The skin falls slowly over the shoulders. It slides down to pool the boy’s naked hips. His inky, wild hair curls about, staticy and damp. Black liquid stains the knobs of his bones protruding through the bright ivory of his skin. He doesn’t turn around. Shiro watches the back of his head for a long moment, his fingers stilled and frozen just inches away from touching him.

“Did you mean it, when you said forever?”

His voice is raw and husky and tired. It’s the kind of sound that fills everything, the sort of soft drag of syllables that Shiro feels clogging his ears and filling his chest and expanding him until he feels as though he could be floating in place. His chest hurts, when he watches this boy, and feels emotions that he thought that he’d forgotten how to feel. And the whole thing is strange in a way that he can’t quite put his finger on, bewildering and bizarre in a manner that’s difficult to piece together in words.

But from behind, the boy’s shoulders are wide and his skin stretches over fine muscle that pops when he finally cranes himself around. His long neck is soft and pale and dangerously touchable, pristine save for a deep scar that’s chiseled from his collar bone and wound up to the furthest tips of his throat. He’s covered in these little marks, when Shiro looks closer. The finest of white scars propped up from his flesh like braille. Shiro resists the urge to run his fingers over those stripes, to catalog them in his sensory memory or to feel if this boy is warm under his wolfskin blanket, or frigid to the touch.

He wants to speak, but the words are smothering in the deep pit of his throat. He feels too many things right now, feels himself compelled to silence by the need to hear this boy speak to him again. Feels oddly emotionally raw and strung out and tired, and his head pounds as the dark corners of the dense forest around him crack with golden sprigs of light.

And the boy, watching him, isn’t nearly as beautiful as he was the first time.

His open lips reveal the slightest sharp pinpricks of teeth, prodding out and vaguely threatening, inhuman, out of place. His violet irises are narrower and deeper, his sclera dark black and void-like, deep like empty sockets that reflect back to him nothing but more darkness. 

The boy continues to watch him, as though he’s waiting for a response, but the light continues to penetrate this fantasy, this dream or this nightmare, and he shakes his head, grasping the wolfskin in his fists and dragging it back over his shoulders.

“I’ll be there soon.”

It echoes, like the ding of a memory surfacing slowly in the back of Shiro’s thoughts. Murky, at first, then flooded out by the racing pulse rising in his ears.

Then light, too much and too bright.

And Shiro, suddenly, nods awake.

The first thing that he notices when his vision clears is the creaky ceiling fan overhead. It moves in slow circles over the ceiling tiles, casting long shadows in the orange light of the room. And then, soon after, Shiro notes the warm tongue dotting his hand, hanging over the edge of what feels to be a small and cramped, scratchy couch.

The ceiling comes together in a point at the center, like a trailer, he thinks. The wooden scaffolding does little to hide this fact, the detailing among the interior of this home cluttered and charming but failing to mask the cheap architecture. 

The decor is befittingly farm-themed. There are red-checkered chickens patterned over the blanket that rests on his lower half. The tongue lapping at his fingers belongs to a fuzzy-faced little shih-tzu that wags its tail when his eyes meet it. It whines in a yappy sort of way, and Shiro lifts his hand somewhat to paw at the soft fur between its ears.

“Leave him alone, girl,” a voice calls out from across the room, over the backside of the couch and obscured somewhere in the too-bright depths of the modular. “Let him wake up before you lick him to death, come here.”

The dog excitedly skitters over the floor, her claws clacking on the laminate as she rounds the couch and disappears in the direction of that voice. Shiro feels the room spinning around him and he raises his flesh hand to rest over his eyes. It smells like dog now, but he ignores it. His prosthetic, he notices, has been removed and placed safely on a threadbare chair across the short length of the living room.

The coffee table between them is stacked with old magazines and medicine bottles. Shiro’s fingers meet a damp washcloth placed on his forehead that’s long-since lost its coldness.

He slowly eases himself up to sit. The washcloth slides from his forehead and plops into his lap, and the room around him is blurry and disorienting and too bright.

“You gave me a scare back there,” the voice calls out from the far end of the open room. “You started talking nonsense about some man named… Adam, I believe. Kept telling me not to zip up the bag, he wasn’t dead. Then you fainted. A buddy of mine did a tour in the war, you know. He came back just like that. Always getting upset about things that weren’t there anymore. He wore a leg just like that arm that you’ve got.”

Shiro gropes the stump left of his arm, just under the sore expanse of his shoulder. He tries to swallow, but his throat is dry and chapped. The breath heaving in and out of his lungs catches in it, and he feels as though he can’t take in enough oxygen. His hand drops to rest over the damp washcloth in his lap, and finally, with squinted eyes, he peers over the back end of the couch and catches Sal in the kitchen, a short distance away, drying a wet plate in his hands over the island counter.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro tells him. “Thank you for taking care of me.”

Sal’s lips part in a wry smile. He waves the dishrag in his hand in the air and swivels around to drop the plate in the slots of a drying rack next to the sink. 

“It felt normal back then,” Sal says lowly. “Guys went off to war and they came back different, less. Their heads were all jumbled and they spoke nonsense and some of them committed crimes. It wasn’t an honorable thing. Government just tossed ‘em aside like they were garbage. Used up, you know? Damaged goods. But seeing a kid like you… Seeing all these kids these days doing the same thing. It puts everything in perspective. A kid your age has no business carrying around that kind of weight, but still… that doesn’t stop the world from fucking us all over too soon, does it?”

Shiro watches him for a long moment as he continues plucking dishes from the sudsy water in the sink and scrubbing them off, rinsing them, then drying them before setting them in the rack. He thinks about a lot of things that he could say right now, reassurances and further thanks and apologies. Backstories that feel too raw even a decade later, things that he’s never even admitted to his therapist.

He cranes his head to the side to study his prosthetic on the chair. The cool air inside of the modular prickles goose pimples over the bare skin of his chest.

“I never fought in any wars,” he says. “I did this to myself.”

Sal cracks a laugh. The bowl in his hands clinks against the other dishes in the drying rack as he drops it. 

“I’m not some dumbass hillbilly who hates mental healthcare. I know you aren’t enjoying your situation one bit.”

Shiro plucks the washcloth from his lap and drops it on the coffee table. His fingers bury into the fabric of the blanket wrapped around him, warping the images of the chickens dotted over it. When it folds over, some of their heads disappear. He tears his eyes away.

“You’re right, yeah… but… what happened to your friend?”

Shiro listens to the clicking of the shih-tzu’s nails against the floor. He watches idly as Sal drops down behind the counter and coos at it. The distant halls in the modular lead further into the belly of Sal’s home, disappearing into bedrooms and offices or whatever he might have converted his son’s bedroom into once he moved away.

This large room contains the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. The counters are piled messily with bread and canned food, the dining room table fitted with chicken feed and various rusted farm equipment. The floor is dotted with dog toys and the magazines on the table are all for gun brands and farming.

There isn’t a single hint of a woman or anyone but Sal himself living here.

“He floated around for a long time,” Sal tells him finally. “Aimlessly searching for something to make him feel like a person again. He runs a small farm now, sells his produce to a local diner. He’s on good, friendly terms with his ex-wife. His son’s in college. He has a good life.”

Outside, through a single window in the living room with the blinds drawn back, Shiro can see the grass flipping in the breeze and the trees swaying gently. He watches the dots of the cows in the distance, still grazing, and the clouds moving about in the blue sky overhead. He rubs at his sore shoulder, his eyes drawing lazily over the plump apples hanging from the closest tree. 

And on a branch at the far end of it, he sees the dark wings of a crow. Its long beak points in his direction. Its beady eyes, too far away to make out beyond its blob of a silhouette—he can’t help but feel, for some reason, that they’re watching him.

* * *

Sal helps him back to his car after an extended visit, after they wait around for an hour or so for Shiro’s dirtied clothes to finish tossing around in Sal’s old noisy dryer. Sal makes light of it, cracking a few small jokes about how hard he’d fallen and how no one could even pay him to lay down and take a nap in the cow-poop-infested grass of his property. Shiro laughs because it’s polite to do so, and because it feels good, surprisingly, for someone to joke about his situation in a way that makes everything feel a lot less serious. He’s so used to building his debilitating situation up as an effigy to his past trauma in his mind that sometimes he forgets that he’s okay. He’ll _ be _ okay. And that his mantra is less of a thing to repeat to himself to urge him back from another panic attack and more of a very real reality that he’s living every single day.

Sal reminds him of that, for a little while. Shiro scratches the shih-tzu behind the ears as Sal tells him about the war. Shiro affixes his prosthetic back in place and ignores the way that the straps grate against his skin.

His clothes smell like laundry detergent and they’re pleasantly warm when Sal plucks them from the dryer. The pajama pants that Sal loaned him are so wide around the waist that even tightening the drawstring fully does nothing to keep them solidly on his hips. They’re plaid-printed and thick, wooly, staticky fabric. Small sprigs of dog hair sprout out from the fibers, but they’re comfortable. He mourns them when he collects them in a neat pile and leaves them sitting on the sink in Sal’s cramped bathroom. He catches sight of himself in the mirror and runs a single finger over the dark circles under his eyes, tugging at the loose skin and the small wrinkles just beginning to develop there.

Aging is tiresome, he’s learned. Growing older is a journey that only becomes harder every day.

Sal offers him lunch but he politely refuses. He’s re-dressed and awake again, so there’s no reason for him to stick around, to impede on Sal’s personal space and take advantage of his kindness any longer.

While Sal walks him to his car, Shiro makes a point of avoiding the red barn as they pass it, straining his neck to watch the distant grazing cows as Sal, too, makes a point not to mention it.

He’s tucked his files into the passenger-side seat of his car moments later, feeling a little strange about manning a vehicle after his backout earlier and the subsequent intrusive memories that still float around in the back of his thoughts, but he tries his best to keep the dread out of his expression. He’s already done more than enough to inconvenience Sal today, and he definitely isn’t eager to add anything else to the growing list.

“Thank you again,” he says softly, leaning through his window and resting a hand on the sun-warmed exterior of his car as Sal stands, arms crossed, in front of him. “I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Sal waves a hand dismissively in the air between them.

“‘s not a problem, man, don’t sweat it. Take care of yourself, though. There are sickos all over the world, and it’s not worth worrying yourself to death over just one of them. I’m sure the bastard who killed my dog will be caught eventually. Those kinds of weirdos aren’t known to disappear without a trace. But take it easy. Call me if you need more info. Although I think I told the cops everything that I know anyway.”

Shiro nods, his fingers drawing over to rest against the base of his shoulder, just where it meets his prosthetic. He’s excited, once again, to return home and remove it, to massage some salve into his wounds and take a nap. To forget about all of this for an extended amount of time until he needs to collect all of his data into a neatly-organized first draft for his article.

“We really appreciate your assistance with all of this. We understand that you want to move on from it, so revisiting all of these bad memories can’t be easy.”

Sal laughs, hands sliding down to his hips, his abdomen pushed out as he stretches his back, turning himself in the direction of the cows grazing in the pasture and a blackbird that Shiro catches sight of, watching them from its odd position between the coiled points of electric wire wrapped around the fence.

“The new bad memories distract from the old ones,” Sal tells him. “If you wanna pay me back someday though, come back next summer and write an article about my peach trees. Sales didn’t do too well this year.”

Shiro smiles, agrees, and shakes Sal’s hand. As he’s switching his car from park to reverse, Sal stops him with a hand on the doorframe, holding it in place.

“One last thing,” he says. “When you were conked out, you said something kinda weird. Just one thing, just,  _ ‘I’ll be waiting for you’ _ . Didn’t know if that should mean anything to you, but… Just figured I’d let you know.”

And he eases off, waving as Shiro backs out, as he adjusts himself and turns, winding over the dirt pathway to the entrance of the farm. A sick feeling settles in the depths of his belly, sour and heavy, cold weight. He clears his throat but it’s too dry, feels like swallowing sandpaper. Cloudiness fogs at the corners of his vision, and he’s forced to pull over for a moment in order to clear his thoughts enough to keep driving.

Miles out from Sal’s farm, he rests his head against the steering wheel, feeling every ounce of the contentment and reassurance that he’d felt just moments ago leaking out of every new hole in his heart. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to go home. Suddenly, he finds that he’d rather eat lunch at the diner and waste a few hours meandering around town. 

He has to go home to work. He can’t dither now that he’s collected so much helpful data.

But he wants to avoid everything just a little bit longer:

The bald spot on the grass in front of his cabin, the strange dreams, the possibility, once again, of being alone in the thick of every odd thing that’s happening to him right now.

The lingering thought, in the back of his head, that the handwriting on that note this morning didn’t belong to Lance.

* * *

**Me 4:55 PM** : Thanks for this morning.

**Lance 4:58 PM** : No problem, man! Always happy to help! But what did I do again?

**Me 5:02 PM** : For bringing in my groceries? You left a note.

**Lance 5:05 PM** : No bueno, amigo. I’ve been in Illinois since this morning. Did you know that they put an entire pickle on their hot dogs? Like they cut it, sort of, but there’s NO WAY to eat these stupid things without basically eating the whole pickle sliver first. I’ve eaten so many hot dogs in the like, ten hours that I’ve been here that I think I’m going to smell like pork for the rest of my life.

**Me 5:10 PM** : You haven’t been home since you left Colorado?

**Lance 5:11 PM** : Nah, man. Sorry. I got the go-ahead from Allura to fly from Colorado to Chicago for this exposé about the “Ten Must-Visit Diners in the Midwest”. Chicago first, then Missouri for Gooey Butter Cake and Thin-sliced pizza. Then to Iowa for  _ more  _ pork. Pork, pork, pork. These people love their pork. 

**Lance 5:13 PM** : Why? Someone left you a note?

**Me 5:20 PM** : It was probably Allura. I’ll ask her next time I see her.

**Lance 5:21 PM** : Yeah, probably! She’s thoughtful like that… always looking out for you, always on top of things. She’s really the best boss, if you ask me. I mean, imagine how miserable our jobs would be if she were useless and shitty like any other boss! The worst part about traveling is that we’re limited to phone calls and emails, but maybe next time I have a vacation, I’ll see if she wants to go out. Who knows, maybe it’ll work this time?

**Me 5:23 PM** : You’re right, Lance. Fifth time’s the charm, right?

**Lance 5:24 PM** : Please have some faith in me, okay? I’m well-traveled! I’m handsome and mysterious and interesting! Women are lining up to get with me, got it?

**Me 5:25 PM** : Of course, Casanova. Try to spare some romance for the rest of us losers, okay?

**Lance 5:26 PM** : Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. But also let me know what’s up with your grocery situation, okay?

**Lance: 5:28 PM** : And, uh… by the way. I talked to Matt. He messaged me online. He’s been asking about you.

**Me 5:35 PM** : I’ll talk to you later, Lance.

**Lance 5:36 PM** : Okay, yeah, you’re busy, got it! Take care of yourself.

* * *

Shiro finds himself, once he returns home from the diner, sitting on his living room chair and studying the sticky note in his hands. The writing isn’t elaborate or loopy like Allura’s, and it isn’t even admittedly anywhere near the same as Lance’s slender, bubbly and cheerful hand either. It doesn’t look even remotely familiar, doesn’t resonate with him as he continues to rove his eyes over the clumsy lettering and the scribbles that blend together in some places. The way that it’s scrawled as though whoever wrote it hadn’t held a pen in a very long time. It definitely looks rushed, like whoever penned it down was in a hurry to leave, which, this morning, seemed reasonable enough if Lance only stopped by for a visit between meetings, but…

It obviously wasn’t Lance. 

Lance has, in the past, definitely been capable of playing a prank on him from time to time, but it isn’t like him to keep a joke going for as long as this has now gone on. It’s been a couple of hours since their text conversation, since Shiro had given him more than enough opportunities to come clean and admit it and he’d still maintained that he was too far away to pull something like that off.

He refuses to address the other thing that Lance mentioned, won’t entertain the idea right now, when he already has so much on his plate. The mere mention of Matt’s name makes an eerie kind of chill crawl up his spine, goose-pimples sprouting over his arms as he settles more comfortably in his chair and blows a short breath through his nose.

Matt had been the final in a long list of “it’s not your fault”s that Shiro had encountered after the funeral. And that’s the only thing that he’ll allow himself to think about any of it—about Matt’s absence from his life, now, despite the fact that they live barely an hour away from each other, despite the fact that Matt apparently asks about him, and does so very often. People grow apart, he thinks, and some are torn that way by tragedy. It’s silly to assume that they’d have anything in common anymore. It’s foolish to even attempt to cobble together the disrepair of their friendship when, well…

Shiro is so unwilling to even address what went wrong with them in the first place.

He shakes his head. He’ll think about this harder later, or maybe never. He doesn’t have time for it right now.

His phone has been silent since he stopped texting Lance an hour ago. He hasn’t heard from Allura or the police department or even the animal hospital. And while some part of him feels as though maybe he should call and check in on Keith, he continues to remind himself that the vets promised to keep him in the loop. If there’s any news, he’s sure that they won’t hesitate to contact him.

He sets the note on the table and stares down at his closed laptop at his feet. It’s late in the afternoon now, growing nearer to nightfall as the days grow shorter, the closer it draws to winter. He closed the living room blinds when he came home, feeling uncomfortably exposed in the silent stretches of the woods around him where, often, he remembers being kept company by birdsong and shuddering branches and a cacophony of nature that today is completely, noticeably absent.

He considers finishing his Q&A articles, but it’s difficult to type one-handed. His shoulder still aches where he’s removed his shirt and rubbed the appropriate amount of aloe lotion over the angry marks left there from the straps, but he doesn’t feel any better. It still stings, and he still just wants to sleep. But he worries, too, about that boy revisiting him in his dreams, and guiltily, embarrassingly lonely, there’s a part of him that feels too eager to fall back into sleep if only to finally get to the bottom of what all of this is supposed to mean.

“I’ll be there soon”—cryptic but curiously not completely nonsensical. He finds that, in his dreams, he’s never even remotely surprised by the words. He doesn’t question where “there” might be or what will happen when the boy arrives. He doesn’t wonder about the wolf-skin or the backdrop of the highway or why the boy is so startlingly inhuman until well after he wakes up. There’s a sense of calm that overtakes him when he sees the boy, a sigh of relief that exhumes the dead breath lingering in his throat, held there for so long that he’s breathless when he’s awake seconds later. He feels somewhat like the sculptor Pygmalion, as though he could be capable of falling in love with an image conjured up in a dream. Feels strangely more at home after braving the hurricane of repressed emotion to reach that place and that boy than he’s felt for years in his waking skin and the four walls of his dilapidated cabin that he hides away in.

He remembers reading, a long time ago, about the concept that no one can create a face in a dream. He doesn’t know how realistic the claim is, and if there’s even a concrete way to prove it. But he wonders when he would have met someone so flawless, and how he could have gone all these years without remembering him until now.

And why, for whatever reason, the image of him only becomes more warped the more he dreams about him.

It has to be some kind of mental allegory for the way that his twisted mind works. As though his brain could be trying to torture him with the idea that he grows only more distant with others the more that he gets to know them, that somehow, he always finds something wrong enough with everyone that stops him from becoming as close to them as he’d prefer. It’s a tall theory, he realizes. These could just be very weird dreams. He’s never been one to believe in the occult or dream dictionaries or fortune-telling. He’s never been anything short of pragmatic and scientific, believing in nothing that he can’t prove or see with his own eyes.

So why does the dream feel so important? Why is he suddenly so focused on the concept that it has to mean something?

Why can’t he just drop it and carry on with his crowded to-do list?

He leans back further in his seat, tugging on the handle of the recliner and allowing himself to fall back, his throat and chin pointed at the ceiling above him. The room around him grows darker and shadowed as he studies the cobwebs in the rafters, as he thinks about Sal’s modular and the little shih-tzu, and the bullet holes in his old, red barn. He wonders what all of this means, and what it means for the town. If it really could just be an animal or teenagers terrorizing their neighbors just in time for Halloween, and how anyone could stoop to doing those horrible things just for fun.

He knows that it happens and that it happens often. He isn’t so blindly optimistic that he’d deny it to himself, that in the endless reaches of the world, people are capable of being deplorable.

But it’s all so jumbled up, all so confusing and disgusting and bewildering, and right now… Shiro just wants to sleep.

And so, finally, he does.

When he nods to, he’s slumped against a long, scuffed and faded table. His elbows dig into the binding of a daunting pile of textbooks laid before him, their covers glossy and fingerprinted and smudged with years of wear and tear that reminds him, too, of all of the hours that he’s spent pouring over them in order to study for midterms.

_ An Abridged Guide to Astrophysics _ ,  _ Intro to Mathematical Science _ . Bold, white letters on dark bindings that look just as intimidating as the information that’s cataloged and bound inside of them. Heavy enough, he knows, that Matt has joked often with him that if he were to fail his tests, at least he could use one of two of them as a proper bludgeon to put himself out of his misery.

Matt isn’t here, now, in this crowded library. He’s at home, maybe, studying for his own set of tests or suffering for the evening at the retail job that he despises. He wears a garish red polo shirt and an ill-fitting pair of khaki pants as his uniform. He spends his evenings directing customers to overpriced printers and ink cartridges and answering their questions about RAM. Shiro isn’t envious of his position. He’s lucky enough to make his money as a tutor here on the weekends—just enough money to pay his bills and afford a nice meal at a moderately-priced fast food joint if he’s worked enough overtime. 

He doesn’t have an appointment with another student for a few days. Astrophysics is his Saturday-morning subject. He covers trigonometry in the afternoon, then forensic astronomy at night. Today, however, he has the evening off to cover his own subjects. He tries to focus on the notes that he’s jotted down in his notebook, but the letters sizzle, crawling around on the page like a dozen tiny ants under a sunlit microscope. 

In the orange-cast of the late afternoon sun, poured in through the wall-sized windows behind him, the surrounding library feels liminal and otherworldly, like a memory that he’s living in the moment. Like a scene in a movie, where everything is set up perfectly to emulate the feelings that he feels right now.

The scratchy oak desk under his palms, the ache in his spine. The headache thrumming at the backs of his eyes, his tiredness and hunger. The sleepy sort of aura that’s blanketed over everything—Shiro feels as though he’s living in a waking dream. And he straightens himself, popping his back and drawing a hand over the drool on his mouth, and jumping when someone behind him pops him on the back of the head with another heavy book.

He reels around, and Adam smiles down at him, taking a seat directly next to him only a moment later.

“So you’re finally up,” Adam greets him, dropping his book spine-first on the table and allowing it to fall open to a random page. “I thought you might have slipped into a coma. I could almost see the little planets rotating around your head.”

Shiro blows a laugh through his nose, resting his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, scrubbing them for a moment before craning his neck and peering at Adam through the cage of his fingers.

“My advanced astronomy professor is offering a summer internship at the space station to anyone who falls in the top ten percent of test scores in her class. It’s a good opportunity.”

Adam studies him for a long moment, looking briefly as though he might say something before biting his lip and pointedly turning his attention to the pages of his book. He flips through idly through them, any semblance of a smile fallen from his lips as his brows draw low and close together and he continues studying the finely-printed words on the page.

Shiro feels his chest pinch, the air in his lungs stalled there for a moment as nervousness and dread inkle at the back of his thoughts. 

“A good opportunity doesn’t mean a _ job _ opportunity.”

Shiro huffs, immediately the hair on his proverbial hackles raised. He feels indignance fanning in his chest, jerking his head in the opposite direction and glowering at the empty aisles of shelves some ways away. He drops his hands down to the table, his knuckles knocking against his book pile as he glares out into the deeper passages of the library, his jaw locking and his pulse hitching as he forces down his voice before he even finds his suddenly absent ability to speak. 

This isn’t an unusual argument for the two of them as of late, he knows. As the end of this semester draws nearer, as his peers find internships and job opportunities, Shiro finds himself constantly conflicted between his newly-burgeoning relationship with Adam, his friendship with Matt, and all of the dreams that he’d once had when he wasn’t so tightly tethered to life on Earth.

“You don’t want me to do it,” he says simply, and Adam barks a quiet laugh.

“I just don’t think it’s realistic. Do you know how many people actually become astronauts? Do you know how unlikely it is that even a single person in your class will find work once you’ve graduated?”

Shiro turns then, quick and jerky enough that his head swims as he grasps tightly at the edge of the table. As he chews on all of the mean things that he wants to say, but chooses not to.

“Do you think I’m not good enough?”

“It’s not about being good enough or not, it’s—”

“No, tell me. Do you think I’m not good enough to do this?”

“I—” Adam pauses, burying his teeth in his bottom lip and turning his head away. A long moment passes between them in silence, and Shiro slowly deflates, feeling small and petty and guilty. Feeling just as ill-equipped to handle his relationships with other people as Adam always accidentally makes him feel.

It’s the coddling, he thinks. It’s the way that he always seems to know what’s best for him, even if it’s not what he wants. It’s the “I told you so” look about him when Shiro attempts to do something his own way and inevitably fails, and these constant impromptu lectures when he’s only trying to talk about his classes with his boyfriend.

This is just how relationships are, he knows this. Adam tells him that their peers aren’t so stuck with their heads in the clouds, they’re not so blindly idealistic. Adam says that he has to grow up someday, he has to stop being so naive and childlike, and that the world doesn’t care what he wants from it. It just is. It just continues on and it’s not fair and sometimes it’s not fun. Sometimes, things change, and he has to cater his expectations to what he’s capable of doing and not to his wildest dreams. Matt says that Adam is just worried about him, that he wonders if there’s a place big enough in Shiro’s heart to accommodate the new life that they want to make together.

And Shiro wonders, childishly, why no one ever asks what _ he _ thinks about all of their carefully-made plans about his life.

He sighs deeply, situating himself forward in his seat and crossing his arms over the surface of the table. He finds himself idly studying the words on the binding of his books again, thinking sulkily about his straight As and his good recommendations and wondering for what must be the hundredth time what he’d possibly have to do in order to be “worthy” in Adam’s eyes.

“It’s not that I don’t think you’re good enough,” Adam says finally. “I just—I don’t understand why you still want to. I get that you had this _ “big dream” _ when you were a sad orphan with no real ties to other people, when you were a kid, but you… you’re not alone now. You have me, and Matt, and I—I just don’t understand why everyone else is growing up and you can’t seem to. We all dream of being astronauts or the president when we’re little, but someday, you have to grow up and have reasonable, attainable goals. You have to aim for something that’s actually doable.”

Shiro levels him with a look.

“What, like being a journalist?”

“You don’t have to be an asshole about this. I’m just saying—”

“You’re _ just saying _ that you don’t want to support me because you think my dream is stupid.”

More silence. Shiro stares off angrily at the few bodies of fellow students moving about the library. He watches the librarian sliding returns back onto the shelves, and listens to the soft pattering of pages turning and the scribbles of notes being taken. He watches the dust particles floating like crystals in the orange-swatched air around him. He ignores the feeling of a deep cavern carving out in his chest. 

It hurts too much to love people, is the thought that echoes in the deep recesses of it. It isn’t worth it, if it’s going to feel like this. If he’ll feel, inevitably, as though he can’t ever please the one person who his opinions should truly matter to.

He shakes his head.

“Look, I—”

“Just go.” Adam cuts him off. “Go ahead and chase your stupid dreams in space. Leave me and Matt and all of this behind. But I’m not waiting around for you. I’m not going to be your weeping widow, pining for you back home every night for months and years while you shoot off into space and live some childish dream. If you leave, I won’t be here when you get back. So you can choose. I’m done holding you back.”

Shiro shakes his head, screwing his eyes closed tightly as a strange feeling of nostalgia rushes over him.

_ ‘I’ve done this before,’ _ he thinks. _ ‘This has already happened.’ _

But that doesn’t stop it from hurting all over again. He feels his chest caving in, feels the wetness edging the corners of his eyes. Feels himself, once again, a hollow ache at the prospect of living his life for himself. Of catering to only his own needs, of sacrificing either his connections for his dreams or his dreams for his connections.

A second time, he feels displaced and lost and confused. He knows of regret, feels a familiar kinship with it. He knows that often, people say that if they could go back, they’d make the right choice a second time. They claim that they could make things right after living through the consequences of their mistakes.

But Shiro, now, realizes that he’s reliving a memory. And just as he had the first time, he doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t know how to fix this, how to find himself in ownership of everything that will make him happy: his boyfriend, his dream, and his best friend. A life that would make him proud. A version of himself that isn’t nothing but a pile of wasted opportunities and missed chances and potential that fizzled out long before he was ever given the chance to prove himself.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Adam says then, cutting through the blur of this memory, changing things at a moment when, now, he can’t possibly recall how this moment ended.

“I’ll be dead soon anyway.”

And when he jerks his head back in Adam’s direction, there’s blood. Too much, and flesh flayed and bone and muscle crushed and mutilated, in a shape barely resembling a human anymore. His glasses, askew, are crushed and broken glass puncturing the ground meat of his cheeks. An eyeball sits loosely at his cheekbone, tethered only by a single root that disappears into the wet black of its socket.

Redness spills from between the broken teeth of his grin. Around them, Shiro hears the murmuring and the sirens, the shuffling of that body bag growing nearer and nearer and louder, then—

He jolts awake.

He heaves a few deep breaths, eyes bulged and wide and seeking through the dark living room for solid proof that none of that was real. His heart pounds so violently that it feels as though it might leap, any moment now, straight from his chest. And he reminds himself, again and again, frantically, _ ‘You’re safe, you aren’t in any danger. Nothing can hurt you now.’ _

He curses lowly, sobbing as he wraps his arm tightly around his chest and rocks forward and back. His throat feels raw and his skin, clammy. There’s sweat itching at his brows, nerves stiffening his muscles as he struggles desperately to chase away the dam of forbidden memories and mental images that threaten to spill over into the forefront of his thoughts. 

He peels his arms from around himself, rubbing his hand over his face, mixing the sweat and the tears but not caring about the mess as he finally begins to decline from the panic that he felt ebbing up inside of him just seconds ago. It’s quiet tonight, still and silent and even absent of the familiar cricket-song that should be accompanying the night outside.

He hears it, or the lack of it, when the blood stops rushing in his ears. His head hurts, pounds in a headache under the surface of his forehead. His neck feels stiff and cramped. He’s overheated in his sweater and pajama pants under the blanket that he doesn’t remember draping over his lap.

He shoves up from the chair, feeling rubbery-legged and dizzy as he stumbles through his black living room in search of the general area of the kitchen. His socked feet catch and his legs tangle in the blanket, but he kicks it off. His shin knocks against his coffee table and he yelps and curses loudly, hopping in place and reaching down to massage away the hurt before he carries on.

There’s a small dotting of something wet as he passes his front door. He slides in it briefly, feeling terror fanning in his chest as he almost loses his balance. It’s too dark to see what it is. He ignores it, feels it warm and damp on the undersides of his socks as he finally manages to reach the black depths of his kitchen.

He reaches for the lightswitch but misses. He’s too thirsty and too overstressed and tired to bother with it. He guides himself against the wall, around the dark silhouette of his kitchen table and closer to the sink.

The images at the back of his thoughts fan like licking flames. Adam’s bloody face, the grimace on his lips just moments before that truck flipped the median and barrelled head-on into them. The paramedics yelling, whispering, the crowd around them gasping and crying and collecting their voices into a roar so loud that it was barely drowned out by the rush of blood in his ears.

The pain in his arm, the image, for a brief second, of an empty, bloody stump remaining there when the ambulance pried him out from between the flattened pieces of steel that remained of his car.

He gropes the counter, dragging himself along and barely able to breathe. He rounds the barstools, clambering around them before finally, after what feels to be many, many hours, he reaches the sink. Next to the basin of it, he finds an empty glass that he rinses out first before he wrenches the tap. He closes his eyes to the darkness around him, listening to the water sputtering into the glass as he wills back the headache that splits through the center of his skull.

He tries desperately to remember his mantra, to chase away the images that blossom in the back of his thoughts.

It’s been a long time since Adam died.

It’s been so long now that he shouldn’t still be so affected by it.

His hand shakes as he raises the glass to his lips. He gulps it down, feeling ravenous suddenly as it soothes his aching throat. Outside, the only light illuminating the dense forest around his cabin is the automatic glow of the porchlight. It glistens against the dew on the grass and shines bluntly against the dying browns and oranges of the trees’ leaves. And as he reaches the bottom of his glass, something slides downward, lodges in his throat, round and hard and obstructing his airway so abruptly that he drops the glass, flails his arm about, and gags.

He thumps a closed fist against his chest, his ribs expanding desperately and water shooting through his nose as he struggles to clear his airway. He chokes violently, slamming his hand, then, on the counter and doubling over. He can’t breathe for too long. He gasps and chokes and sputters until, finally, he manages to dislodge the barrier blocking his throat. He can hear it tap against the tile floor. He coughs a few more times, spitting out something that must have broken off from it and stuck to his tongue. It’s damp and crinkly, coated in his saliva so thickly that he has to peel it out of his mouth.

His throat feels torn up, feels as though he’d just swallowed a razor blade.

He’s on his knees, wheezing, his hand cradled in front of his spit-coated chin. His eyes watering and his skin dewy with new sweat, the dampness on the bottom of his socks growing colder, puddles of water and whatever fluid he tracked in her soaking into the knees of his pajama pants.

He can see the dark shape of the thing dislodged from his throat sitting still, for a moment, then slowly wriggling around. He falls back, hand clasped tight on his throat before he scrambles to his feet, pacing around the tiny, moving thing and reaching over the counter to flip the light.

And when he spots it, when he really understands what it is, he feels bile rise in his throat. He falls back against the counter, lightheaded and doing everything in his power not to vomit as he watches the injured, black-coated thing scurrying around at his feet. 

A roach skitters around in a streaked puddle of black in on the floor, just where he’d spit it up. He falls further back, lifting his foot for a moment as though he might stomp on it, but feeling another wave of vertigo overcome him. Stalling there, horrified and repulsed and weak with disgust as it scuttles through the black puddles and squeezes what remains of its one-winged body through a crack in his bottom cabinet.

It leaves behind the other wing. The one that Shiro peeled from his tongue.

And when Shiro drops his head to the side and gazes almost blindly into the sink, he’s horrified to spot another one, then two, sliding their fat bodies through his faucet and popping to the bottom of the porcelain bowl, shuffling around wildly in more puddles of blackness that seep through the faucet to join them.

He slips and trips on a rushed journey into the laundry room in search of the bug killer that he knows is hiding behind one of the cabinet doors on one of his many cluttered shelves. He turns on every light on his journey from and back to the kitchen, shaking and cursing and willing down the sick that still threatens to rise in his throat.

His dream and his worries and the horror that he awoke with are shoved back to the far corners of his psyche. He stomps back into the kitchen, pausing for a single moment as he prepares himself for the daunting task at hand.

When he returns to sink, ready to kill each and every one of those horrible, disgusting little bugs, there’s nothing out of the ordinary in his kitchen but a broken glass spilling water on the floor, a faded puddle of black scuffs, and the sink still dribbling the smallest spits of water. There are no roaches rounding the drain inside of it. There’s no wing left behind on the tile at his feet.

Outside, the dark silhouette of an animal passes through the trees, caught just through his peripherals as quick, unidentifiable motion that jolts him from his dumbfounded studying of the empty sink. He sets the bottle of bug killer next to him on the counter, propping his hand on the ledge and leaning forward, nearly pressing his nose to the glass as he squints through the darkness in search of whatever caught his attention just seconds ago.

There’s nothing out there either. He wrenches the curtains closed, turning and surveying his kitchen, feeling itchy and too bare. Feeling suddenly as though eyes are watching him from all directions despite the fact that he’s alone and it’s silent, and even the black streaks on the floor have now disappeared.

He wonders if he was still asleep when he came in here.

He wonders what might have woken him up.

But his throat still hurts. His feet still feel damp, and when he raises them, they’re dotted with small stains of black that he can’t find the source of even when he searches the floor just near the front door, where he’d felt that puddle originally but now, can’t find it.

There’s no trace of anything strange happening here, he knows.

But even still, he doesn’t sleep well later, when he tucks himself in bed and stares at the rafters of his dark ceiling for long hours of the night. He can’t shake the feeling of that bug in his throat. He can’t push the sound of Adam’s voice out of his head.

He can’t stop feeling like something is watching him from every shadow, even when he turns on his bedside lamp and eventually falls asleep when the sun skims the horizon outside.

He awakens a few hours later to a house and a yard and a surrounding forest that are all frightfully, alarmingly too quiet.

Outside, from the thick wall of trees around the cabin, the dark body of a wiry-haired dog waits.


End file.
